O'Connor, Flannery.: a Good Man Is Hard to Find"

Topics: A Good Man Is Hard to Find, Family, Flannery O'Connor Pages: 3 (1041 words) Published: November 4, 2008
According to Shakespere, "All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players". Some people, in their daily lives, do more intentional acting, or decieveing, than others. The terms "Friday Muslim" or "Sunday Christian" have been coined to describe people who appear to be devout to their religion when they attend their weekly religious gathering, but otherwise do not display any moral connections to it. These people put more importance on appearing as a good and richous person rather than actually thinkning, speaking, and acting according to the religious documents they claim to follow. Living this sort of life proved to be fatal for the Grandmother in Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man Is Hard to Find. The Grandmother's religious hypocracy caused her to corrupt the thoughts of her grandchildren, manipulate events onto a negative path, and ultimately cause the death of her and her family.

Studies done by the National Child Study indicate that children's views are larely shaped by "caregiver/child interactions throught childhood"("Measuring"). John Wesley and June Star's mother and father seem to be very passive and quiet with thier views. In comparison, the Grandmother is outspoken, opinionated, and presents herself as a religiously knowledgable, and there for trustworthy, person. The children seem to have picked up on her racist views as their normally argumentitive resopnses are absent when she makes condesending comments about an ovbiously poor "Negro child standing in the door of a shack"(O'connor) they pass on their trip. The impression of the grandmother's views into the children is also aparent when, rather than being appalled at her racist story about a suitor bringing her watermelon, "this story tickled John Wesley's funny bone and he giggled and giggled"(O'connor). Also, June Star shows signs of the same materialistic shelfishness of the Grandmother when she states that she "wouldn't marry a man that just brought her a watermelon on...

Cited: "Measuring Racial/Ethnic Discrimination and Racism From a Developmental Perspective Workshop ." The National Children 's Study 24 June 2004 12 Oct 2008 .
O 'Connor, Flannery. "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." 12 Oct 2008 .
Continue Reading

Please join StudyMode to read the full document

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor Essay

    ...In “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, by Flannery O’Connor, the theme is grace, the idea that nothing we do can save us from our own faults. In the beginning of the story, the grandmother talks about how you cannot even trust anybody in the world, while she is actually being more untrustworthy than those of the world. After reading the story, you can see how her actions and her words are ironic because she is actually lying and cheating the family. Analyzing the characters, setting, and irony of the story, we can see how trust is a major issue throughout the story and how they have a rather dysfunctional family. In “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” the characters are important because their thoughts and actions mold together and make the story what it is. If there were one character missing, the story would not be the same. The mother is a character that hardly plays any role, and hardly ever says anything. Also, in the wreck, the mother was the only one who got hurt. The main thing the mother does is take care of the baby. With that being said, the character of the baby is mostly just to take up the mother’s attention. Also, taking some of the grandmother’s attention when she holds the baby in her lap for only a few minutes during the ride. June Star is Bailey’s daughter. Throughout the story, we learn that she is a rather disrespectful...

    Read More
    1202 Words 3 Pages
  • "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" by Flannery O'Connor Essay

    ...*Re-read the Story "A Good Man is Hard to Find" by Flannery O'Connor , following the “Re-Reading Fiction Suggestions” above. Answer the following questions: Are there any details that were newly recognized during this reading or that you notice tie in with earlier ones? I gained a better visual of the car the family was riding in while re-reading the story. I didn’t understand they were in a car, I had visualized the family riding in a station wagon. I also became aware of the fact that at the end of the story The Misfit picks up the cat after it had been thrown from the car and the grandmother had been killed. If evident, what significance does the title hold, and in what possible ways is it lined to the actions and the characters? The reference of a good man was seen throughout the entire story. I believe in comparison there is symbolism between the idea of a good man like Red Sammy versus a character like The Misfit is a direct representation of Good and Evil. Are there any words that are unfamiliar, and how does knowing what they mean make a difference in re-reading the story? Valise (suitcase), Sachet (purse), Ambling (saunter: to walk leisurely). Knowing the definition of these terms allowed me to better understand the appearance of the grandmother and the setting inside of the car. What is...

    Read More
    1290 Words 4 Pages
  • Essay on A Good Man Is Hard to Find By Flannery O’Connor

    ...1 Intro to Lit. Prof. Rupp Feb 18 2013 You’ve Got Good Blood Literary Analysis of “A Good Man is Hard to Find” By Flannery O’Connor “You’ve got good blood.” “I know you come from nice people,(504) cried the grandmother. “Pray!”(505) she pleads using grace and religion to plead to the better nature of what she thinks is still a good man. The story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is about a family on vacation to Florida. The family takes a detour down a dirt road to look at an old plantation house that the grandmother tells a story about. She describes the house in such an intriguing way that most of the family is very eager to see it. However on the way the grandmother realizes that the house isn’t in Georgia at all but in fact in Tennessee, where she was longing to go instead of Florida. This startles her and she begins knocking things around and the cat jumps out of the basket landing on Bailey’s neck causing the car accident that leaves them stranded on the lonely road. When a passing car stops to help the grandmother quickly recognizes one of the men as “The Misfit”, a dangerous man who has escaped from prison. The grandmother confronts him and he tells her “It probably would have been better for your family if you had not recognized me at all lady.”(504)...

    Read More
    1264 Words 4 Pages
  • O'Connor "Good Man Hard to Find" Essay

    ...steal,” she seems to always be defending her right as a worker for Mrs. McIntyre. The first sighting of the displaced persons was a spectacle for Mrs. Shortley as she realized the people did not look like aliens or animals, but were in fact human. Better yet, these new workers had some better qualities. The husband turned out to be handier for working the farming equipment, the son a useful translator, and the daughters more beautiful than Mrs. Shortley’s. Of course after seeing these traits and specialties of the foreign people, Mrs. Shortley does not accept the foreigners, in fact, “every time Mr. Guizac smiled, Europe stretched out in Mrs. Shortley’s imagination, mysterious and evil, the devil’s experiement station” (O’Connor, 211) . She instead tries to find a way to discredit them for her own benefit. Although Mrs. Shortley has no authority over anything in her life, including Mr. Shortley, she attempts to sound like she does. Her long speeches to Mr. Shortley about whether or not the Guizacs can actually speak English or if they know what a still is have no intent to make Mr. Shortley aware of his own possible unemployment. Instead, she hopes to just blow off frustrations in a lude attempt to sound more educated on the subject than her husband. Comically, he only answers her questions of hearing the complaints with a “no.” The fact that he answers in such a seemingly disrespectful tone only shows Mrs. Shortley that he is below her in...

    Read More
    1740 Words 5 Pages
  • A Reflection on "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" by Flannery O'Connor Essay

    ...lounge. After reading the whole story I could then make a connection of the theme of religion and evil in the interactions of the old lady with the owner of the restaurant and the Misfit. While the grandmother was talking to the owner they began discussing the idea of a "good man" and how he is hard to find, also, tied into that the character of The Misfit. "…'It isn't a soul in this green world of God's that you can trust,' she said. "A good man is hard to find," Red Sammy said…" Here, we see the grandmother and the man who owns the restaurant discussing the old times compared to now days and saying that no one is good anymore and that you can't trust anybody. Later in the story, towards the end, the old lady is telling The Misfit that she thinks that he is good, that she knows it As the story progresses I felt tense and, latter, "horror" sensing the coldness in the Misfit and the family final destiny. The last sentence of this short story confused me. I didn't understand what he meant when he said that " she would have been a good woman if everyone had been there to shoot her every minute of her life. Could it mean that if we knew beforehand how our life will end we would try do things better and be good?...

    Read More
    380 Words 1 Pages
  • The importance of violence in "A Good Man is Hard to Find" by Flannery O'Connor. Essay

    ...The Importance of Violence in "A Good Man is Hard to Find" by Flannery O'Connor. In the story "A Good Man is Hard to Find", Flannery O'Connor uses violence as a force of both good and evil to demonstrate how people's attitudes and perspectives of life change when they are faced with a situation of violent danger. The story is about a family of six who, on their way to Florida are murdered by an escaped convict who calls himself the Misfit. The characters include the grandmother, her son Bailey, his wife and their children John Wesley, June Star and the baby. In society violence is generally looked upon as evil because it is believed that no good can result from violence. When looking at the occurrence of violence in "A Good Man is Hard to Find" the reader sees the obvious negative aspect of death which results from violence. The deaths that are a result of the violence elicit feelings of pity and terror which demonstrate the negative aspects of violence within the story. The attitude change in the grandmother demonstrates how violence is used as a positive force. The change in attitude does not occur until the very end of the story and up until that point the grandmother is rather hypocritical and selfish....

    Read More
    856 Words 6 Pages
  • A Good Man Is Hard To Find Essay

    ...Jada Gardner Professor Moir May 6, 2015 English 1102 Society and Class in “A Good Man is Hard to Find” In Flannery O’Connor’s short story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find” the grandmother and the Misfit become the main focus even though the other characters are involved in the story. Throughout the entire story, The Misfit is portrayed as the symbol of evil because he was in jail; he escaped from jail, and he committed murders. The grandmother believes to be greater than the people that she are around because of the “good” that she portrays. The conventional meaning of good, or possessing or displaying moral virtue, is not the particular good that the grandmother is trying to portray throughout the story. The grandmother believes that good is portrayal of a social class. Throughout the short story, O’Connor portrays “good” from a social class aspect rather than from the conventional aspect, through the grandmother. As an elderly woman who was born in another generation, the grandmother doesn’t understand why her family members do certain things that they don’t. In the beginning of the story, the grandmother is obsessed with worldly things. She always cares for how people perceive her. She wants to go to Tennessee, so she can be connected with her roots; however her...

    Read More
    1446 Words 6 Pages
  • Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard To Find" Essay

    ...Important Aspects In "A Good Man Is Hard To Find" In "A Good Man Is Hard To Find," Flannery O'Connor hints that the story will involve coincidence. She tells us in the opening paragraph that the grandmother has second thoughts about traveling to Florida for a vacation because she has a bad feeling about a loose Misfit she had read about in a news article. This foreshadows the trouble to come, and coincidence advances the plot in the direction of this trouble. The grandmother's concerns about the trip foreshadow the events in the story. When the family decides to take a trip to Florida, the grandmother shows her worry about a Misfit heading their way. She believes the family should vacation to Tennessee, where she can visit some of her connections. She tells Bailey "the children have been to Florida before" (328). Either way, the grandmother was going to go on the trip, but she was not going alone. The grandmother brought along her cat without her son Bailey knowing about it. "She didn't intend for the cat to be left alone in the house for three days because he would miss her too much and she was afraid he might brush against one of the gas burners and accidentally asphyxiate himself" (329). Her concerns about the cat later haunted her as the family decided to take a detour from their trip. The grandmother informed the family about an...

    Read More
    863 Words 3 Pages

Popular Essays

Become a StudyMode Member

Sign Up - It's Free