A Good Man Is Hard To Find Ending Essay
Emily Harless
December 8th, 2013
ENG 101
Dr. Jimmy Dean Smith
Happy or Sad Ending to “A Good Man is Hard to Find”?
“A Good Man is Hard to Find” is not one of those short stories you read and easily forget. It is a piece that stays with you long after you have read the last line. What makes it so hard to disregard is the fact that, once it’s over, the readers find themselves puzzled by their own thoughts on the ending, especially when you are trying to fit the story into a neat little box of happy or sad. I have never found myself searching so hard for that answer with any other story, but with the way that Flannery O’Connor masterfully shapes her characters and their appearance to us, it is hard in the end to decide whether or not we are truly sad for the deaths of all the characters.
When I say this, I speak specifically for …show more content…
I’m not going to lie, I am not a fan of any member of the family, and I believe that they are all somewhat bad people, due to the way that they put so much importance on their personal wealth, but to see young children and their parents die does upset me. I am human. But if the grandmother had not died, I would be very disappointed in O’Connor’s choice, because if anyone in the story deserves to die, it is most definitely that old woman. I have never had such contempt and dislike for a protagonist in my life. There are people who society can see, black and white and plain as day, as being genuinely bad people, but the ones you have to look out for are the ones who underhandedly manipulate everything around them, and that is exactly what the grandmother is a master of doing. This, in my eyes, makes her the true villain in the story. But, since the grandmother dies, the ending to the story is only somewhat sad, and had it been only her who died, I could say that this story had a truly happy
December 8th, 2013
ENG 101
Dr. Jimmy Dean Smith
Happy or Sad Ending to “A Good Man is Hard to Find”?
“A Good Man is Hard to Find” is not one of those short stories you read and easily forget. It is a piece that stays with you long after you have read the last line. What makes it so hard to disregard is the fact that, once it’s over, the readers find themselves puzzled by their own thoughts on the ending, especially when you are trying to fit the story into a neat little box of happy or sad. I have never found myself searching so hard for that answer with any other story, but with the way that Flannery O’Connor masterfully shapes her characters and their appearance to us, it is hard in the end to decide whether or not we are truly sad for the deaths of all the characters.
When I say this, I speak specifically for …show more content…
I’m not going to lie, I am not a fan of any member of the family, and I believe that they are all somewhat bad people, due to the way that they put so much importance on their personal wealth, but to see young children and their parents die does upset me. I am human. But if the grandmother had not died, I would be very disappointed in O’Connor’s choice, because if anyone in the story deserves to die, it is most definitely that old woman. I have never had such contempt and dislike for a protagonist in my life. There are people who society can see, black and white and plain as day, as being genuinely bad people, but the ones you have to look out for are the ones who underhandedly manipulate everything around them, and that is exactly what the grandmother is a master of doing. This, in my eyes, makes her the true villain in the story. But, since the grandmother dies, the ending to the story is only somewhat sad, and had it been only her who died, I could say that this story had a truly happy