A Good Man is Hard to Find – a 1959 story analysis

First distributed in 1953, after her changeless move to Andalusia, her mom’s dairy cultivate, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” delineates a considerable lot of the systems and topics which were to describe the run of the mill O’Connor story. Since she was restricted by her disease to short and rare outings from the homestead, O’Connor figured out how to draw upon the current assets for the topic of her stories. These assets incorporated the general population around her, her perusing material, which comprised of different books and periodicals which came to Andalusia, and a collection of neighborhood and local daily papers.

A few pundits have called attention to the impact of territorial and neighborhood daily paper stories on O’Connor’s fiction. The Misfit, the obsessive executioner who kills a whole family in this story, was evidently manufactured from daily paper records of two hoodlums who had threatened the Atlanta territory in the mid 1950s; Red Sammy Butts, as indicated by another pundit, may have been founded on a neighborhood “esteemed gentleman” who had made great and came back to Milledgeville every year, on the event of his birthday, to go to a dinner in his respect, facilitated by the nearby shippers.

“A Good Man is Hard to Find” analysis shows that O’Connor’s treatment of the characters in this story strengthens her perspective of man as a fallen animal. Quickly, the story portrays the devastation of an inside and out excessively ordinary family by three got away convicts. The topical peak of the story includes an offer of effortlessness and the grandma’s acknowledgment of that blessing because of the epiphany she encounters just before her passing. The occasions which prompt that peak, in any case, produce a significant part of the enthusiasm of the story.

The peruser’s first perspective of the family is one intended to delineate the irreverence and dispute which describe the family’s associations with each other. The grandma’s
vanity and narcissistic state of mind are made clear in the initial three lines of the story. Instead of submit to the family’s arrangement for a trek to Florida, she wishes to visit a portion of her “associations” in east Tennessee.

In the following line, one discovers that Bailey is her solitary child, a touch of data which keeps a conceivable misreading of the grandma’s last natural words, “You’re one of my kids,” and in this manner keeps the peruser from missing the activity of elegance toward the finish of the story. In her endeavor to get the family to go to Tennessee as opposed to Florida, the grandma utilizes the news story of the got away killer, the Misfit, to attempt to alarm Bailey into altering his opinion. In spite of the fact that Bailey does not answer her (in this manner demonstrating a total absence of regard for her), the occurrence gives an amusing hinting to the finish of the story.

At the point when Bailey neglects to react to her weight, the grandma endeavors to get her little girl in-law, a dull young lady with a face “as expansive and blameless as a cabbage,” to enable her to persuade Bailey to go to Tennessee instead of Florida in light of the fact that the kids, John Wesley and June Star, have not yet visited Tennessee. Bailey’s significant other additionally disregards the supplication, yet the non-vocal discourtesy of the guardians discovers voice through the youngsters. Their direct toward the grandma stresses the insolence which is normal for the whole family.

Although “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is an early work in the O’Connor ordinance, it contains a large number of the components which come to portray the lion’s share of her short works of fiction. The greater part of her stories contain a person who has a solid sentiment of self-assurance or feels that he has lived such that his direct can’t be addressed. As did the Greek tragedians, O’Connor seems to view these characters as being in a condition of hubris (a condition described by domineering pride and a feeling of being past the run of destiny) and considers them to be being ready for calamity.

Consequently, in story after story, these people are conveyed to an emergency point in their lives, and they see their self-assurance decimated by occasions, or else they encounter a snapshot of effortlessness which makes them rethink their past lives and to see the world in another and profound light. In like way, a significant number of the stories end in viciousness since O’Connor felt that it much of the time took brutality to stir the vain individual to the deficiencies of life.

References:

• A Good Man is Hard to Find Analysis – Shmoop | www.shmoop.com/good-man-hard-to-find/literary-devices.html
• A Moment of Grace in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” | blog.pshares.org/index.php/a-moment-of-grace-in-flannery-oconnors-a-good-man-is-hard-to-find/
• A Good Man Is Hard to Find (short story) | en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Good_Man_Is_Hard_to_Find_(short_story)

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