Many people struggle with the idea of what it means to be a “good” person and what it means to be a “bad” person. The human quest to be good drives virtually everything we do but sometimes in the end may not amount to enough. We all want to be good, but it 's not easy. If you ask an evil person and a good person the same question, "Are you a good person?" Who do you think is more likely to say yes, the good person or the evil person? Everyone has their own opinion about certain issues, and they depend on their values, judgment, and beliefs to see them through their difficulties. Flannery O’Connor, an American writer, was quoted as saying "I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. This means the meaning of life is centered in our Redemption by Christ and that what I see in the world I see in relation to that" (Contemporary Authors 402). In the short story "A Good Man is Hard to Find," Flannery O’ Connor illustrates her argument of good and evil through a grandmother who struggles with her own insincere sense of goodness, and the Misfit who represents evil. Only true goodness illuminates when in the face of something bad. In the story a character who views herself as good comes to realize that this goodness that she believes she has cannot protect against the works of evil.
I Analysis of a Good Man
O’Connor paints her own picture of what the grandmother believes to be a “good man.” The grandmother seems to treat goodness mostly as a function of being decent, having good manners, and coming from a family of "the right people." At the beginning of the story the grandmother discusses a story of her past love explaining how he was the most upright gentleman she met, claiming he too was a “good man.” She stated “he was a very good- looking man and a gentleman and that he brought her watermelon every Sunday afternoon with his initials cut in it, E.A.T.” (O’Connor 98). The grandmother was unique in the way she described
Cited: Contemporary Authors. New Revision Series. Ed. James Ethridge and Barbara Kopala.. Gale Research Company. Detroit. 1981. 402-403. “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” O’Connor, Flannery. In A Good Man is Hard to Find, by O’Connor, Flannery; Asals, Frederick. pp. 31-54. Rutgers University Press, 1993. (24 pages).