A Good Man is Hard to Find
In the story "A Good Man Is Hard To Find," Flannery O'Connor attempt to show her readers of the error of their humanistic assumptions and their limitless need for God's grace. She does this through the implicit comparison of a little old lady and a serial killer, the Misfit. Most reader would assume that the old woman should represents a qualified sort of goodness and the Misfit represent evil; I, however, would hold precisely the reverse. Most reader would contend that the old woman represents life and the Misfit death; again, I would hold the opposite, believing that the old woman's grace-less life was a living death, and that through the Misfit she gained a chance of attaining salvation. The story opens as the little old lady's family is planning to leave on a vacation. But there is nothing sweet about this domestic scene; neither the old woman nor her grown son, Bailey, are able to command any respect from Bailey's impudent children, and we sense a tension between the strong-willed Bailey and his tremendously self-righteous mother. The grandmother tries unsuccessfully to convince Bailey that hey ought to visit her relations in East Tennessee, and failing this, she bring her cat along on th
This is where the epiphany happened. Just before the Misfit kills her, the grandmother suddenly looks at her executioner in a whole new way: "Why, you're one of my babies!" (O'Connor, 863) What does this mean? For the first time in her life, the old woman has cut through the type we tend to substitute for religion and recognized that true religion is defined, not in appearances or protestations of piety, but in the actuality of our relationship to God. She sees in that instant that the enormity of her sin - her ignorance, and her complacent rejection, of God - is such that in God's eyes the serial killer is no different than she is. Throughout the second half of the story, after she meets the Misfit and things turn dangerous, the grandmother has referred to Christ and to prayer a number of times, but it is only as she herself is returned to God that she recognizes the reality of his handiwork. As the grandmother died "...half sat and half lay in a puddle of blood with her legs crossed under her like a child's and her face smiling up at the cloudless sky", we realize her final realization send her to heaven with God. The Misfit's command of her is right on target: "She would have been a good woman, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life" (O'Conner, 863). In order for Grandma to achieve her selfish want, she lied to the child. Grandma points Bailey down an old country road that she believes will take them to the old plantation, and there they swerve off the road, only to be 'rescued' by the party of a serial killer. This is, of course, deeply symbolic. The grandmother, in her eagerness to impress upon her "Goodness of the Past," ironically shows the legacy she have really lost
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1158
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
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