by
Flannery O’Connor
(bio and
other books)
The title of this story is also the title of O’Connor’s first
collection of short stories. Told in third-person,
the focus is on the Grandmother's perspective of
events. O’Connor does a brilliant job of
foreshadowing, entertaining, shocking, and forcing
the reader to ask difficult questions. She is
relentless in her depiction of these
characters—they are not likable. And so, by creating
such annoying, unsympathetic characters, O'Connor
has carefully set the premise for her main argument:
the grace of God is for everyone; even the most
unlikable.
The story begins when a family packs up their car and heads south
from Tennessee
to Florida for a family vacation. The family is as
annoying to the reader as they are to each other.
The Grandmother is the most annoying of them all.
She complains that she doesn’t want to go, but she’s
the first one ready to go. She sneaks her cat
into the car, even though she's been told not to
bring it along, and she wears her best dress and
hat—in case she winds up dead on the side of the
road, she explains, people will know she was a lady. Along the
way the family stops to eat and the Grandmother gets
into a conversation with the proprietor about a
convict on the loose---he is known as The Misfit.
Through this character, The Misfit, O'Connor
explores the Christian concept of "grace"—that a
divine pardon from God is available simply for the
asking. In the story, it is the Grandmother—a
small-minded, cantankerous, and bossy old woman—who
realizes grace at the moment of her death, when she
reaches out to the Misfit and all of a sudden sees
him as one of her own children. For O'Connor, God's
grace is a power outside the character, a moment of
epiphany. Nonetheless, her characters are usually
too stubborn or unwilling to acknowledge the grace
of God.
Quote from
A Good Man is Hard to Find:
“The
Grandmother didn't want to go to Florida. She wanted
to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee
and she was seizing at every chance to change
Bailey's mind. Bailey was the son she lived with,
her only boy. He was sitting on the edge of his
chair at the table, bent over the orange sports
section of the Journal. "Now look here, Bailey," she
said, "see here, read this," and she stood with one
hand on her thin hip and the other rattling the
newspaper at his bald head. "Here this fellow that
calls himself The Misfit is aloose from the Federal
Pen and headed toward Florida and you read here what
it says he did to these people. Just you read it. I
wouldn't take my children in any direction with a
criminal like that aloose in it. I couldn't answer
to my conscience if I did.”
Buy
A Good Man is Hard to Find:
Texts and Contexts
Read
our bio of Flannery
O'Connor and peruse her other books.
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