A Good Man Is Hard To Find Character Analysis Essay

Flannery O’Connor’s gripping short story titled, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” follows a dysfunctional family of six on a road trip to Florida lead by the nagging head matriarch, the grandmother. At the beginning of the story, the grandmother’s feisty attitude is made apparent as she is not in agreement with the original family venture. Instead, the grandmother convinces the family to visit Tennessee to drop into an old plantation which houses a mysterious secret panel. A series of unfortunate events happen once the family decides to go along with this new venture and causes the family to get lost along the way, but what the family loses is more than just their sense of direction; they end up losing themselves to a malevolent character called, “The Misfit.” Flannery O’Connor’s dramatic tragedy gives way to a symbolic journey in which a southern family trip ends in horror to demonstrate to the reader that there is hidden significance within every scene in the story to allow us to dig deeper into our own existence.

What’s a good man? Can it be descriptive?. And can that person be identified as a good man who is hard to find?. The story of “A Good Man is Hard to Find” talks about a grandmother whose name is not mentioned directly in the story. Mystery has it, that she has been explaining her story as if she was the good man or who knows what she could be talking about referring someone or telling someone that good men are hard to find. The author Flannery O’connor wrote this story in 1953, where there must different events occurring causing the relations of racism and different inventions throughout the history that had been shaping America. Therefore, a lot of important events that must it been happening when she was writing this story could be similar to women behaving or acting like men who take responsibilities to different levels of structure to indeed understand the terms of a “ Good Man”. This is just the beginning of where the writer directs the story towards a horror story or even an uplifting depiction of someone’s own will.

Questions 1. Does the grandmother uncover the newspaper that hides the cat in the valise on purpose? I am asking this question since the grandmother doesn’t want to get blame from her son as she comes to know that the old plantation isn’t in Georgia? 2. It is a little bit awkward that even though they know the Misfit is on the loose, they still decides to go on the trip anyway.

Moreover, the grandmother lies even before her death, which is not an honorable act for a moral person. The story already gives us a hint that the grandmother has an indefinite personality by not giving her a name because people often times react to what they are called. Therefore, her character is one of a selfish, evil person. In the short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” the grandmother is an old lady that only cares

The grandmother who remains unnamed all throughout in the story is the protagonist and the central character of Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is hard to Find, a tragic story of a family who decided to go on vacation but got killed randomly on the road by a criminal on the loose named “The Misfit”. She is endowed with a joyful spirit, a passion in life in spite of her age. She is a non-stereotypical woman whose old fashion clothing and beliefs contradict her strong, manipulative mind, an opposite trait of a passive and complacent woman in her time. The Grandmother is a smart woman who knows how to assert herself by trying to use all the

People change the way they act when they realize that the odds are not in their favor. In “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” by Flannery O’Connor, The Misfit believes that the grandma’s true nature is that she is not and will never be a good woman; it would take a violent situation where someone has to point a gun to her head to force her to realize all of the sins she committed. The grandmother’s moment of redemption was, ironically, the moment before her final breath. If it were not for someone threatening to shoot her, she would still be the same old selfish person that she was before.

She criticizes the children’s mother for not wandering to a place that would permit the children to be “wide-ranging,” and she compares the mother’s visage to a cabbage. Later on in the story, she proudly wears her cautiously selected dress and hat, being sure that being a lady is the main asset of all. The grandmother by no means, ever turns her critical eye on herself to examine her own dishonesty, selfishness, and hypocrisy. For example, the sense of right and wrong the grandmother invokes at the start of the short-story is handily quiet when she sneaks the cat into the car, lies to the kids about the secret panel, and decides not to admit that she made an error about the location of the house they were going to. When the Misfit methodically kills the family, the grandmother does not beg him to keep the children and grandchildren alive. She tries to drag him into her own world by assuring him that he’s a good man and yet agrees with her assessment of him, but doesn’t see this as a cause to keep her alive. This is a moment of awareness, one that is right away followed by her

Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" has been critiqued over the past sixty years since its first release in 1953. It is the story of a manipulative, unnamed grandmother whose personality led to the demise of her entire family on their vacation to Florida. She endeavored manipulated her family to vacation in Tennessee, and attempted to manipulate The Misfit into not hurting or killing her, in which, she failed both. The grandmother's form of manipulation is persuasion.

In conclusion, it was up to the Grandmother’s death that s he realized her rude, obnoxious, judgmental, and selfish ways had gotten her no where and she will have to pay the ultimate price. The Grandmother never uttered a word about God or prayer until she was down on her luck, the Misfit acknowledging that the woman “would have been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute in her life”, did not spare her life merely cause she was a lady, what she interpreted as being morally good (Bedford/St. Martin

Flannery O’Connor’s short story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” centers around a selfish, hypocritical grandmother as she joins her family on their vacation to Florida. During the entirety of the trip, the grandmother constantly displays her self-centered attitude by secretly bringing her cat along, deceiving her grandchildren, and manipulating her son into visiting an old house she remembers. Even when the grandmother realizes she misremembered the location of the old house, she opts not to inform the rest of her family. Her vanity and selfishness ultimately cause the demise of her entire family.

“A Good Man is Hard to Find” was the best-known short story of Flannery O’Conner that was written in 1953 and published in 1955. She was born in Christian family and she was sent to parochial school since she was young. The idea in Roman Catholicism strongly influenced to her writing. She usually wrote the story that include violence and situation of crisis. She tells the story about a grandmother who is confident with herself encounter with crisis moment which can change grandmother attitudes.

However, it can also be argued that her encounter with the Misfit doesn’t change the grandmother at all, but instead reveals her true character. Specifically, readers can realize that she is acting this way strictly out of the want to survive; the grandmother didn’t think that the Misfit was a good man, she was simply saying those things in order to convince him not to kill her or her family. This argument can further be supported when the grandmother makes her final plea of, “I'll give you all the money I've got!” (O’Connor 152), showing that she realized her fake flattery didn’t work, revealing that she is still the same selfish person she was all along. Through this, readers are able to discover that the Misfit and the grandmother are similar, sharing an essential human kinship in regards to the fact that neither of them are true “good people”. It is true that the grandmother keeps up the appearance of a lady, as seen when, in reference to her clothing, the narrator states, “In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady” (O’Connor

Without a doubt, the grandmother is the main character of “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” All throughout the story, the grandmother is getting her family into a number of problems and causing arguments between them. For example, from the very start, the family is planning on taking a vacation to Florida. However, the grandmother totally disagrees with this choice, going on and on about how they should be vacationing to where she is

The grandmother, “in A Good Man is Hard to Find” utters these words before she dies because in her final moments she realizes that she is closer to the Misfit than she thought. She realizes that they are both human and she is no better than him. Her sense of superiority of being a lady drifts away and social classes topple during the last minutes of her life. The grandmother is a flawed character. During the last moments of her life, when she hears her family being killed one by one, she does not beg for their life.

In O 'Conner 's “A Good Man Is Hard To Find,” the grandmother shows signs of being hypocritical in her relationship with her son, others and also the misfit; she fails to convince the misfit of his self worth as far as being a good man; but despite the failing to convince him she triumphs by believing he is a good man which in turn is why she is a hypocrite.