Grace in A Good Man Is Hard to Find

Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find tells the story of a family from Atlanta, Georgia as it makes it way to Florida for a vacation. The five members of the family include the grandmother, her son Bailey and his wife. Among the passengers are three children, one of whom is still a baby. There fatal deaths in the end illustrate the belief that everybody has their own unique flaws. The grandmother plays a pivotal role in the story considering the fact that she selfishly convinces the family to divert momentarily from the expected route. In From ‘One of My Babies’: The Misfit and the Grandmother, Stephens Bandy points out that the grandmother was extremely evil. John Desmond, on the other hand suggests that the grandmother is not necessarily a strictly evil person. With reference to the short story, this paper explores Bandy’s and Desmond’s critique’s of A Good Man is Hard to Find. The paper argues that the grandmother is absolutely to do anything for her selfish gains. Furthermore, the paper argues that people are not entirely good or evil, but respond to different events in unique ways.

Toba Beta, author of Master of Stupidity, quotes, “An accusing heart couldn't see her own sins.” This is true for the grandmother in “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, who is quick to point out the sins of others but only recognizes her own sins at the end of a gun barrel. This points out a main theme of the story, that some people are quicker to show others lies and sins than their own, and how sometimes the most judgemental of people are also the most sinnful. Grandma and Red are the best example of characters that judge others, yet they seem to sin more than the others, with a prime example being Red beating his wife and grandma attempting to save only herself while her family is getting shot in the woods. O’Connery shows through symbolism, the concept of sin and the characters sins, and through grandma’s final acceptance of her sin, that “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is truly about religious acceptance and repentance, and how it is never too late to repent, even in your final moments.

Writer Flannery O’Connor is known for her very few, yet very famous Southern Gothic works of literature. A key component O’Connor uses in her stories are “moments of grace”. O’Connor describes these as situations, usually violent, which “return [her] characters to reality and prepare them” to reach a peak of religious enlightenment. Her work which most prominently features a “moment of grace” is her 1955 short story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”. Once the family has all been shot by the criminals except for the grandmother At the point in the story where all the family has been shot and killed except for the grandmother, we are presented with the grandmother’s “moment of grace”. Whilst the Misfit is discussing being unsure about Jesus raising

Readers are first introduced to the family at the center of the story, headed by patriarch Bailey. Bailey is, the audience soon learns, stubborn and self-centered, above all things. His mother (the grandmother) futilely tries to convince him to change the destination of their family vacation from Florida to Tennessee, but he ignores her. Even as his mother tells him about The Misfit, who is headed toward Florida, he remains “bent over the orange sports section of the Journal” (O’Connor 137). Bailey is not a likeable character; from both his reactions to events and descriptions of his character, one might imagine him to be a gruff, imperialistic man who believes his word to be law. He refuses to acknowledge the grandmother’s concerns by ignoring her outright (although, to be fair, readers quickly learn that everybody in the family seems to be in the habit of brushing her off), and takes

The family wants to take a trip to somewhere exciting. There is a disagreement amongst the family to where to go. Bailey, (the father) the grandmother’s son wants to take the wife, the two kids, John and June, and the baby, to Florida. The grandmother doesn’t want to go and argues with them. To make her case, she mentions that there’s dangerous criminal by the name of The Misfit on the loose, and that he’s headed that way.

In the beginning of the story the grandmother comes up with a plan to change her son Bailey’s mind into going to east Tennessee instead of Florida. She does so by reading a newspaper to him stating that the Misfit is “aloose from the Federal Pen and head[ing] toward Florida.” This foreshadows her future meeting with the Misfit himself that is to come even though she “wouldn’t take [her] children in any direction with a criminal like

Flannery O’Connor like to add a touch of spirituality to her stories, with “A good man is hard to find” it seem as though she is using the Christ to paint the picture of the story to teach a moral lesson. The article expresses the grandmother as manipulative and moralistic and in many way she was especially when she did things such as bribing her granddaughter, inciting the children to disrespect their father, not telling the truth about the old house with the secret panel, When the misfit stated Christ didn’t raise the dead and in a effort to ingratiate herself with the agnostic the misfit said “maybe he didn’t raise the dead” her own moral compass seems conflicted. While the Misfit seems as if he lost all sense of his motility and now feel that because of all the things he when through in his life he is morally obligated to commit these heinous crimes. As these two characters have this conversation it seems as if the misfit is realizing that his moral structure is a result of the choices he made or other made that guided him to that

The grandmother starts off the story with a warning to her son, saying that she wouldn’t dare take the children to Florida with a guy like The Misfit on the loose. According to the new paper that she’d read, The Misfit was headed to Florida as well. She said that she’d feel terrible about it if she were the parents. Bailey, her son, ignores her, and decides that they are going to Florida anyway. The grandmother means well, but her son only sees her suggestion as being annoying and not necessary.

The quest to find a “good man” concludes with the grandmother being saved as she tries save the Misfit. Arthur Bethea, in his article on this short story remarks that, “O’Connor recognized no need to explain why God chooses the grandmother to plant the seed of grace in The Misfit; what she did is provide details to indicate the Divine’s presence, if not clarify his motives (Bethea, 4).” The Grandmother acts as a pivot point of receiving grace in this story, and of transferring that grace to the Misfit. We see no explanation why the grandmother was chosen to be the figurehead of grace in this story, however, God does not need a reason for bestowing mercy or favors to one particular person and not to another. While O’Conner does not provide a reason for the bestowing of grace, she gives clear signs to show us the presence of a Divine power (Bethea, 2).

Naturally as humans we like to identify ourselves with a set of values. This code helps to form a sense of being, an identity that sets us apart from others. However, inconsistency is just as much a part of humanity as is our sense of morals. Common decency is plagued by our desires. In Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”, we follow a grandmother and her family, and we learn about her own selfish values.

the family to go on a vacation to Tennessee instead of Florida, because they always go to

“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.

The grandmother displayed behaviors of being self-centered. In the beginning of the story, the grandmother deliberately stated, “she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey’s mind” about the family vacation to Florida (O’Connor, 420). It was rude of her as a guest on the trip to try and make it all about herself. If she wanted to see her friends in Tennessee, she should have made her over personal trip to go there. Furthermore, she purposely lied about there being a secret panel to her grandchildren to stir them up, resulting in them going to the plantation. She even expressed, “the more she talked about it, the more she wanted to see it once again…,” and she even said, “she knew that Bailey would not be willing to spend any time looking at an old house…” (O’Connor, 424). First, it illustrates that the grandmother knew her son would not want to waste time on sight seeing an old home. Secondly, that motivated her to make a story up knowing that it would lead to her grandchildren, making the nervous father relinquish to the children request, which was truly the grandmother’s longing.

The grandmother did not want to travel to Florida with her son, Bailey and her daughter in law for the vacation. She preferred to go East Tennessee, where she is familiar with. The grandmother tries to convince her son, by saying the Misfit is a loose from federal pen and has escaped from prison and headed toward Florida. (O’Connor’s 405). The grandmother goes as far as to say to her son that the children has been to Florida so why take them in the direction of a convict. Bailey nor his wife paid the grandmother any attention, but the little boy John Wesley, stated, that if she did not want to go to Florida, she can stay home. The day of the trip the grandmother was the first one ready to go because she did not want to leave her cat Pitty

Flannery O’Connor has been claimed an important figure and a social critic of the South for many years before and after her death. Her prose deals with questions of morality through reflections of her Roman Catholic faith. Correspondingly, her short stories and novels put the protagonists in shocking trials of God through characters or conflicts portrayed as, according to Davis J. Leigh, “distorted or exaggerated,” and are O’Connor’s way of revealing the “human condition to a world that is blinded by naturalism or secularism” (Leigh 2). This was her subject matter which she herself declared in her once unpublished essays now under Mystery and Manners (Leigh 2) and where critics place their doubt. Despite this, one needs to take into consideration the author’s standard of living that is evident throughout her works due to their ironic plot and sublime characters, such as in A Good Man is Hard to Find. In A Good Man is Hard to Find, a Southern family plan a trip from Georgia to Florida, but the sneaky grandmother deceives the children meticulously to manipulate the family to stray off the path, which ultimately leads them to their downfall. Flannery O’Connor’s short story A Good Man is Hard to Find grotesquely portrays the act of receiving grace in its final scene as a necessary and contrasting force that the protagonists must go through to reach enlightenment while