A Good Man Is Hard to Find

[Tristan Riesen]

            A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor is a southern-gothic tale about a family trip gone terribly wrong.  Told from the third person omniscient point of view, with a focus on the grandmother, O’Connor uses an over the back approach to see from all the characters’ perspectives.  The other characters in the story are the grandmother’s son, Bailey, his wife, and their three children named John Wesley, June Star, and the baby. 

            To me the story had a pretty jovial feel to it at first, with foreshadowing that I didn’t realize was foreshadowing until near the end.  Normally that doesn’t happen to me, meaning normally I can catch the foreshadowing and have a sense of what is coming, but not with this story.  I think O’Connor did a great job hiding what kind of end the story was bringing, but more specifically what kind of end she was coming to the characters. 

            The characters end – or demise – is brought on by the grandmother’s actions, as well as The Misfit’s – the story’s nemesis.  The Misfit is an incredibly evil man, which stands in unique contrast to the wrongdoings of the grandma.  After The Misfit kills the grandmother her racial slurs, rudeness, and her rigid manner doesn’t seem to be such a great flaw any longer.  The Misfits evil to me outweighs the grandmother’s awful façade.  If we hadn’t gone over it in class, I would not have been able to see the ‘key’ (the Catholic Church) which unlocks the story.  I had read that O’Connor was a Christian, but I would have had no idea that Catholicism would have been a sort of skeleton key to unlock all the doors of her writing world. 

            The language used by O’Connor was – I would imagine – pretty spot on.  Her own Southern heritage undoubtedly played a key role in this.  The ‘doncha’s’ coming from the children were blemishes on the language of the south, while the grandmother’s racist remarks were all scars of a morality no longer in use – anachronisms even to her son and the rest of his family. 

            Coming back to the foreshadowing which didn’t work for me, I also was not expecting the story itself – in regards to the title – to be about a murderer.  Originally I had thought the story was going to be something of a love story, and maybe if I use O’Connor’s key-of-Catholicism it would turn out that way still.  Nonetheless, I thoroughly enjoyed the contrast of the story’s title with its action.  I think the point of a title with such ability to throw of the reader is do just that, and also helps me to better understand titles in relation to their stories.