"A Good Man is Hard to Find" by Flannery O'Connor

"A Good Man Is Hard to Find" is a short story written by Flannery O'connor in 1953. The story appears in the collection of short stories. The interpretive work of scholars often focuses on the controversial final scene.

Background 

The short story was first published in 1953 in the anthology Modern Writing I by Avon Publications.  In 1960, it was collected in the anthology The House of Fiction, published by Charles Scribner's Sons."A Good Man Is Hard To Find", because of its publication in many anthologies, became the most well known of O'Connor's works.

 

Plot

This story initiates with an unnamed grandmother whining to her son, Bailey, that she does not want to go to Florida but to Tennessee instead, for the family vacation. The family go to Florida anyway. She spites them by getting up early and waiting in the car, dressed in her Sunday best, so that if she should die in an accident she will be recognized as "a lady."

The grandmother talks a lot during the trip, recalling her youth in the Old South and commenting on various things they come across. When the family stops at a old diner, called "The Tower," for lunch, she engages the owner, Red Sammy, in conversation about an escaped convict, who is a murderer, known as "The Misfit." The grandmother agrees with Sammy's assertion that a good man is very hard to find.

After they return on the road again, the grandmother, trying to detour the family away from Florida, begins telling the children stories about a nearby home that she had visited as a child. Upon hearing that it has secret passages, the children become fascinated and want to visit the house, and they pester their father until he agrees to let them go and follow grandmother's directions. When her directions lead them down a dirt road, she realizes that the house is, in fact, in Tennessee and not Georgia. Flustered, she upsets her cat, which panics, causing Bailey to flip the car and end up in a ditch below the road. The children view the accident as an adventure; the grandmother fakes an internal injury in order for everyone to feel bad for her.

The family waits for help. A car pulls up and three men get out, the leader a shirtless, bespectacled man. All three have guns. The man in glasses instructs his cohorts to inspect the family's car and engages Bailey in polite conversation until the grandmother identifies him as an escaped convict known as "The Misfit." The Misfit shot his own father, he says, though he says that's what he's been told --he doesn't believe it. As The Misfit instructs his accomplices to murder the family one by one, the grandmother begins pleading for her own life by flattering The Misfit. When the Misfit ignores her pleas, she becomes speechless. Panicked, she attempts to witness about Jesus. The Misfit becomes visibly angry: he is angry with Christ for having given no physical evidence for His existence, casting doubt about the legitimacy of Christianity. He does not want to waste his life serving a figure who may not exist, nor does he want to displease an almighty God who may exist; he has settled on the idea that "There's no pleasure but meanness." The grandmother suddenly exclaims "Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!", and reaches out and touches The Misfit. He recoils and shoots her three times.

When the accomplice finishes murdering the family, the Misfit takes a moment to clean his glasses, concluding that "she [the grandmother] would have been a good woman, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." He echoes O'Connor's traditional Christian view that this is properly the role of the conscience informed by the Holy Spirit. When his accomplice comments on the fun that they've had in killing, the Misfit tells him, "It's no real pleasure in life."

Again, in O'Connor's view, a phony Christian--that is, the grandmother--through an act of violence finally comes to be genuinely converted. A good man/woman is indeed hard to find. At last the grandmother humbles herself, realizing that she's no better than a murderer and misfit herself--for such are metaphorically her babies, part of the fallen human family. (He is wearing her son's shirt by then--as if to increase symbolically the connection.) She can finally receive saving grace. 

Characters

The Grandmother

Bailey's mother that throughout the story insists that the family should go to Tennessee. She also often refers to herself as a "lady."

Bailey

Atlanta resident with a wife and three children and his live in mother. He crashes their car on a family trip to Florida when he gives into the grandmother's wishes to visit an old plantation.

Bailey’s wife

Quiet woman who spends her time feeding or holding her baby. She is unidentified by name.

John Wesley, June Star

Bailey’s demanding, self-centered children. Their bratty behavior apparently results from a lack of parental discipline.

The Baby

Male child of Bailey and his wife. He is unidentified by name.

Red Sammy Butts

Restaurant operator who agrees with Bailey’s mother that the world is in a state of decline.

Red Sammy’s Wife

Waitress in Red Sammy’s restaurant. She observes that not a single person in the world is trustworthy.

The Misfit

Dangerous escaped prisoner who comes across Bailey and his family on a dirt road after they have crashed. We see that he is having an internal debate of the meaning of life and his purpose in it.

Hiram, Bobby Lee

Prisoners who escaped with The Misfit.

Edgar Atkins Teagarden

Man referred to in a story told by Bailey's mother. He would have been a good man to marry, she says, because he owned Coca-Cola stock and died rich.

Pitty Sing

Pet cat of Bailey’s mother.

Gray Monkey

Pet of Red Sammy Butts. The monkey is chained to a chinaberry tree.

Interpretation

There are varying opinions of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." Most of this discrepancy centers on the grandmother's act of touching the Misfit.

The dominant opinion is that the grandmother's final act was one of grace and charity, which implies that "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" was written to show a transformation in the grandmother as the story progresses. In the beginning, she was more concerned about looking like a good Christian than being a good Christian. This is shown by her selfish desire to go to Tennessee instead of Florida and, more importantly, by her attempts to save her own life, even as her family continued to die around her (made worse by the fact that if she had kept her mouth shut, none of them would have been killed). In the end, she realizes she has not led a good life and reaches out to touch her killer, the Misfit, in a final act of grace and charity. This "epiphany" resembles the grandmother's newly found redemption. Even though she fails, her attempt is not lost on the Misfit, who remarks that through enduring a constant of violence, she would have been a good woman if there had been someone to shoot her every day.

A second opinion on the issue is that the grandmother's final act was not an act of charity and that she is yet again trying to save herself from being murdered. Some say that Flannery O'Connor uses the excuse as the grandmother's final "moment of grace" to save the story from the bloodshed and violence. It is also pointed out that by the time the grandmother touches the Misfit, proclaiming he is her son, he is wearing Bailey's shirt. Other opinions include that it is contradictory of her character or that she was simply again trying to save herself and that her selfishness was never overcome throughout the story.

A third opinion is that the grandmother has many faults but unlike the rest of the family she tries to be a good person and treats her family with respect even when they ignore her. Even when she manipulates the children so they will want to go see the house she wanted to see it is stated that "She said craftily, not telling the truth but wishing that she were". The grandmother feels that to get anything she has to manipulate her family to get it, which is something she doesn't want to do. Also the grandmother is the only one to provide both entertainment and discipline for the children while their parents simply ignore them.

Not every interpretation hinges on a moral judgment of the grandmother, though. For example, Alex Link considers how, until the family encounters the Misfit, the South is mainly something to ignore, forget, package in a movie or a monument, or remember with distorted nostalgia, such that the Misfit comes to stand for the persistence of what can't be bought, sold, or wholly understood, such as death, grace, and "the South."

 

Religious overtones

It was Flannery O'Connor's habit to use the dark and morose to reveal beauty and philosophical prowess; in the case of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” it conveys divine grace. Divine grace is a concept fundamental to Christian theology as unmerited favor. Christians believe the imperfect is made perfect, i.e. people are saved by Jesus Christ. The grandmother in the story gains grace by acknowledging that she helped to create The Misfit and that they are bound by kinship. She reaches out to him as if he were her own. Such religious overtones are common in O’Connor’s work.

Knowing that O'Connor was such a religious writer, many are confused with why she would so often use violence in her short stories. She explained that in her stories, violence is what brings her characters back to reality. In the case of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," O'Connor explained in a reflection piece "A Reasonable Use of the Unreasonable," published in 1969, that violence is her way to make her hard-headed characters, such as the grandmother, accept their time of grace.

At the end of the story, after The Misfit shoots the grandmother, he says to Bobby Lee, "She would have been a good woman, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." This quote is showing The Misfit's enlightenment to what the grandmother had experienced right before he killed her. He is saying that he noticed that she was trying to preach the gospel to him, but that it only happened because she was threatened by death. According to The Misfit, if the grandmother had lived her life held up at gunpoint, she might have lived a more righteous life.

 

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 Reference:  www.wikipedia.org