A Good Man
mikaylanichols
Mikayla Nichols
ENGL 151
November 20, 2012
A Good Man
The grandma is such a rounded character. She is snobby at times, cranky, embarrassed, sad, sweet with the baby, religious, and desperate that she herself might live. The story had wonderful foreshadowing throughout. This is one of those stories where the person deemed wisest tells you it’s dangerous when the odds of something wrong happening to you are one in a million. She warns the father and mother not to go. Even claims it will endanger the children. Then later on at the gas station, the family is warned about “…you don’t know who to trust.” And what do they do? They go hollering for some bad men to come help them out of their predicament, only instead, they all die.
I love stories that tie things together all throughout. You are warned about there being no good men and that you shouldn’t trust anyone, yet the grandma calls the gas station man, Sammy, a good man. She later calls the Misfit a good man. I don’t like how this grandma insists that having higher class blood in your veins makes you a good person, or how the naked child running around wasn’t because it was a hot day and little kids tend to strip. No, it had to be a reflection on color and wealth. I would be a bad woman to say, that the punishment for her causing the entire car accident by selfish notions in an attempt to see a glimpse of her wrongly remembered past, was just.
The death scene at the end of this story was not dramatically played up. For the family to watch the men with guns come up and only have the complaints of the bratty children being spoken shows some real disconnect in this family. The father wasn’t a strong role model. The wife and husband were not in control of their children. The children lacked manners. The grandmother was very self-centered. This family dynamic gave a weird setting to have the males be led off to get shot first. There was no dramatic horror at the husband’s shirt being worn by Misfit. The mother said she would like to be taken to the woods. What mother would say please take me and my remaining children to die where you shot my husband, not one with strong motherly instincts. I wanted sobs and more screaming for the deaths of family members. The only remorseful call is for Bailey by the grandmother, but I feel it was more of a last plea to be saved when her mention of praying didn’t win Misfit over.