In most stories by Flannery O’Connor, her major characters are always confronted by
a struggle for redemption. This is particularly highlighted in the short
story “A
Good Man is Hard to Find” in the conversation between the
grandmother and The Misfit. It is often debated by literary critics whether the grandmother has a moment of grace in the story, just after her
family was killed and before The Misfit shot her. However, this essay argues that there is no salvation in this story since her final action might be interpreted as one more attempt on her part to deflect the criminal’s violence from herself.
In “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”, a young father, Bailey, is about to take his wife and children – John Wesley and June Star – and the children''s grandmother from their home in Georgia on a vacation to Florida. The entire family is portrayed as uninspiring and eternally favoring conventional social values. Especially, the grandmother is portrayed as displaying a soul so empty that it seems to echo with the reverberations of her own nonstop chatter.
self-righteous, self-willed and fanatical with good blood and breeding, the grandmother is determined that the family go to East Tennessee to visit relatives, rather than to Florida. When attempts to persuade her son to alter his plans prove unavailing, she insists that at least they turn off the highway to investigate an old mansion she had visited as a child.
Remembering that the house they are searching for is in Tennessee the grandmother kicks over a valise, thus allowing her cat-hidden in a basket beneath-to spring onto Bailey''s shoulder. Bailey loses control of the car, which bounces off the road and overturns. As the family gets out from the wreck, they see another car from which emerge three escaped convicts. The grandmother blurts out the identity of the group''s leader, The Misfit, whose picture she has seen in a newspaper.
Starting here, O’Connor’s story moves swiftly to its tragedy: first Bailey and the boy, then the mother and her daughter, are led off to the woods and shot. Only the grandmother, rendered almost insane by fear, is left to confront The Misfit, a man who finds no pleasure in life but "meanness" and who claims that “’Jesus thown everything off balance’” (p. 151). The old lady faces The Misfit with nothing more than a mouthful of banalities such as “I just know you''re a good man…You''re not a bit common!” (p. 148) which reinforce the reader’s already established impression that, for her, refinement and goodness are just social counters to be employed whenever expediency demands it.
When The Misfit declares that he has assumed his name because he can not make “what all I done wrong fit what all I gone through in punishment” (p. 151), the grandmother responds by suggesting that perhaps he was only mistakenly committed to the penitentiary. This absurd statement, however, demonstrates how unable she is to comprehend either The Misfit’s belief that everything was once “thown off balance” or the mystery of evil which he himself puzzlingly embodies. That prejudice might be a permanent and irreducible component of human existence, that the world itself might be awry, that sham refinement offers no safe conduct through this life-all of these intimations, as they flood the grandmother’s consciousness, leave her panting and traumatized, in a swoon of disbelief.
As the title suggests, the theme of this tale is the question of what constitutes a good man. Thus, the grandmother''s insistence that The Misfit is an example of this rare species is both ironically appropriate and grotesquely inappropriate. The convict has no illusions about himself and responds to her desperate flattery with the matter-of-fact answer: “Nome, I ain''t a good man” (p. 148). What is noteworthy here, is it seems that The Misfit takes the question of good and evil seriously. While his self-appropriated name connects him to the world of popular psychology and textbohe himself sees his problem metaphysically and religiously. His final speech to the old lady summarizes his radical vision of man’s state. Overall, in O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, the grandmother and The Misfit come face to face with God’s mercy. However, there is no salvation.
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