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A Good Man Is Hard To Find Summary

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What starts out as an innocent family road trip quickly turns into a nightmare that makes the reader wonder what the point of “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor was. There certainly is no satisfaction in reading the murder of an innocent family for seemingly no reason. What starts out as a simple vacation turns violent as the grandmother mistakes an abandoned road for a road that is in another state but once lead to a plantation from her past. There has been much debate as to what was the cause of the deaths, as well as how successful the grandmother was in showing grace to the Misfit. There are critics who feel that the grandmother was a good woman who showed the grace of Jesus until the very end and made a lasting impression …show more content…

Arthur F. Kinney agrees with her but adds that while there is a huge theme of grace in her work, it usually is shown to the wrong people and in sometimes violent ways. Kinney talks about O’ Connor’s life and how it influenced her work. She grew up Catholic and attended convent school where she remarked in a letter that “it was the devils who first recognized Christ and the evangelists did not censor this information. They apparently thought it was pretty good witness. It scandalizes us when we see the same thing in modern dress only because we have this defensive attitude toward the faith” (n.p.). Kinney felt that “she felt compelled to write about an oddness that she claimed was odd to her readers, from their perspective, but not odd to God's, from his” (n.p.). Therefore, while some people disapproved of her dark look on grace and other aspects of God, she did not see her writing as anything but a different aspect of God that most people do not focus on. In “A Good Man is Hard to Find” both the person showing grace and the one receiving it in the story are very flawed. Kinney describes the grandmother as sneaky and proud and she gets “the children to insist on visiting the ruins: she tells them it has a secret panel and some lost silver. Their curiosity and the family's greed thus provoke the fatal error of going there: her own selfish desire corrupts them.” Already the darker character is being

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