A Good Man Is Hard To Find Literary Analysis Essay

Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is hard To Find” is a story about a family heading on a vacation from Georgia to Florida. O’Connor uses literary elements; Point of view, foreshadowing and irony to make this story arouse to someone’s curiosity. In the beginning, the first sentence O’Connor lets the readers know that this story is not told directly by one of the characters & also who this story is mainly about. (1) The grandmother is the character we are told the most about and she is also the only character whose feelings and emotions are clear to readers. Flannery O’Connor also illustrates point of view by the names of the characters in the story. Bailey’s wife is also known as “the grandmothers daughter in law” or “ the children’s mother” Here, O’Connor shows how the grandmother feels, she only thinks of her daughter in law as her son’s wife and her grandchildren’s mother.
Another literary element Flannery O’Connor indicates several times in “A Good Man is hard To Find”. The misfit ends up murdering the family; in the beginning of
An example of this being relevant is that the family is headed on a trip to Florida and ends getting murdered. In this short story the grandmother states “I wouldn’t take my children any direction with a criminal like that a loose in it. I couldn’t answer to my conscience if I did” (1) unfortunately, this is exactly what the grandmother did when she and the family pulls roadside in a deserted location. Irony also occurs after the car accident, when one of the grandchildren, June Star says disappointedly “Nobody’s killed” (67) this is known as verbal irony. Another example of irony is applied when The Misfit comes into the story. Readers can understand the ironic situation but the characters cannot. Bailey states “Look here Now”…. “We’re in a terrible predicament” but the characters do not realize what this predicament