“A Good Man is Hard to Find” By Flannery O’ Conner Argumentative

A Critical Analysis

            This short story by fiction writer Flannery O’ Conner is a humorous portrayal of an eccentric family who initially appears to be on a typical car trip which suddenly goes awry. The author introduces the character of ‘The Misfit’ – an escaped convict – who, together with his companions, are forced to murder the entire family after the Grandmother blurts out the identity of the murderer.

            Reading through literary reviews of this story reveals that the author is a lay theologian and a devout Catholic, who happens to be immersed in Protestant Southern culture. Thus as several critics claim, O’Conner’s work revolves around the theme of Christian mystery, particularly among the American culture of the South. Central to this is her concern with the Christian concept of ‘grace.’ As her story demonstrates, the divine pardon of God is external to the individual and readily available if we only ask for it in our own moment of epiphany:

            Old, overbearing, petty and cantankerous grandmother is nearing her death, and yes, she is not ready for it as she is more concerned with appearances rather than the actual reality. If she had her way she would delay her meeting with the Creator indefinitely. But unlovable as she may appear, she manages to attain grace at her moment of death when she reaches out to The Misfit as one of her own.

            O’Conner’s characters are indeed far from lovable, eliciting little sympathy from readers. Interestingly, she utilizes such portrayals to her advantage – as the premise of her argument that grace is indeed for everyone, even those who do not seem to deserve it.

            In this story, O’Conner uses several narrative techniques writing from the third person narrator point-of-view, as well as telling the story from Grandmother’s perspective. Such a point of view effectively straddles the line between what is referred to as ‘limited’ omniscience – the narrator “interprets one character’s actions and thoughts but we see the others only externally” – (Burroughway 226) and ‘total’ omniscience, or simply, the author as “God” (Burroughway 224).

            It is clear from the onset whose story this is – it is Grandmother’s to tell: “The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey’s mind” (O’Connor 2148). However, there are times when it slips into total omniscience: “There was about ten feet above and they could see only the tops of the trees on the other side of it. Behind the ditch they were sitting in there were more woods, tall and dark and deep. In a few minutes they saw a car some distance. . .” (O’Connor 2154).

            This technique is quite brilliant actually, for it allows her readers to see the story as it unfolds, yet at the same time limited to the grandmother’s point of view. The writing technique is such that she lets us know the character’s thoughts without her having to tell us, i.e. the narrator shows us all the details we need to know while at the same time we are free to draw up our own conclusions on what exactly are the characters’ thoughts. Ultimately we have to go beyond Grandmother’s perspective because she is dead, and the dead cannot think or act anymore, thus the shift to a totally omniscient account of events post-mortem.

            Aside from a rather interesting narrative style, the author also utilizes a lot of symbolism in her work. The Grandmother, the lone dynamic character, appears to represent all those who have seen the light at the end of their spiritual journey. At the onset, Grandmother is obsessed with worldly superficial concerns:

“Her collars and cuffs were white organdy trimmed with lace and at her neckline she had pinned a purple spray of cloth violets containing a sachet. In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady” (O’Conner 138).

            She painstakingly dresses up for the car trip, her main concern that people would still perceive her as a lady in the unfortunate event that she figures in a car wreck. Aside from this concern with appearances, the old lady is also selfish in her desire to go visit friends in Tennessee instead of going to Florida for a family vacation.

            The other character of interest is ‘The Misfit.’ From the term itself, the character offers the opposite of what grandmother appears to represent: the social outcast who fails to fit in, uneducated, unloved, unaccepted. To some extent he represents a quasi-final judgment of sorts in the way he acts, as if merely reflecting everything off him, never really agreeing or disagreeing with Grandmother. Ultimately, he would be the one to take her life and at her moment of redemption, she finally sees the Misfit for what he truly is – another human being just like her and everyone else.

            O’Conner is a writer who invites her readers to go beyond her words, distinguishable by the subtle contradictions of violence and faith in her fiction. Her stories, behind its veil of religious biblical, even violent, imagery, are a testament to her Southern cultural heritage, where all things appear to be in black and white, no blurry gray lines in between. In her world of fiction, one could only take a single road, and avoid another – to live according to one’s convictions, or not at all. At the same time, through her characters she also exposes the deceit and hypocrisy permeating modern-day religious institutions in her darkly humorous fashion and the comical overlay of her stories.

            The gripping violence seems to serve the purpose of shocking her readers into awareness of the larger, more significant truths of life as her stories have a stark, poignant significance to them. Her writing style can be described as unaffected and unadorned, much like the Southern towns and its people she writes about. Yet the subtlety of her style proves to have a sharp edge, making her readers consciously aware of the need to look closer at the points she is trying to convey. Knowing that she is Catholic, reading the story makes me admire her more for her strength and courage to write about such oddly grotesque, violent and unlovable characters engulfed by darkness as they commit one hideous act after another.

            Aside from those already mentioned, another aspect of this interesting work is the claim of a transitory phase from modern to post-modern themes, explored at length in the succeeding pages.

Modernism and Post-modern Themes in O’Conner’s Work

            It is interesting to note the transition from modern and the subsequent utilization of postmodern themes in O’Connor’s work, through her use of multiple perspectives. Similar to William Faulkner, she sets her eye on exploring a small parcel of the real world, which her imagination effectively manages to transform, in the modernist fashion of creating or capturing a pattern of meaning from a plethora of realistic details: the reading on the speedometer; the time the family drives out of Atlanta; particular geographical references to hills, mountains and other topographical landmarks; and popular cultural references, i.e. the children’s mother plays the popular “Tennessee Waltz” on the jukebox, Coca Cola, etc.

            Moreover, the entire story is woven together by this life-changing (and ending) journey. It is a travel narrative, with the destination moving beyond simply Tennessee or Florida, into lessons from the afterlife. Early on, there are symbolic suggestions of meaning other than the literal ones: the possibility of the grandmother’s cat dying if she leaves it at home, her fixation with looking ‘like a lady’ in the advent of dying in a highway accident, the graves in a field they pass by, etc.

            As the trip gets underway and the story unravels, the children reveal themselves as spoiled brats, illustrative perhaps of the lost of respect for family members and elders among the younger generations in an increasingly materialistic world. A grave foreshadowing of death becomes evident when the family “passed by a cotton field with five or six graves fenced in the middle of it, like a small island” (O’Conner 119), the number of graves matching the number of people in the car – five people and a baby – with an eerily appropriate obscure approximation.

            Then the family drops by Red Sammy’s, near the town of Toombsboro somewhere in Central Georgia, suggestive of both real and imagined horrors, the name of the town itself (a clever play at Tomb and bury mixed in with the appropriate Southern accent), the ‘burnt brown’ wife of the diner’s owner, etc. Then the family is murdered by a ragtag group who emerges from “a big black battered hearse-like automobile”(O’Conner 1889).

            O’Conner’s appropriation of external realities highlight the need to transcend the mere words of the story into new levels of meaning:  John Wesley, the founder of Methodism (1703-1791), is in this story transformed into a lively bespectacled child fond of arguments; June Star could possibly be her own way of paying tribute to all the Junes who got last billing in second-feature films of the ‘30s and ’40s; while Bailey confers on the father a kind of “Southern Everyman” status.

            Then there are also the nameless characters. First on the list is the Grandmother, whose domination of the family seems to be larger than her own individuality, and Bailey’s wife who by all accounts appears to be more vegetable than human, with her face like ”a cabbage… tied with a green handkerchief that had two points on the top like rabbit ‘s ears.”

            The grandmother’s use of the name of Jesus and other references to religion could also be interpreted as the author’s central preoccupation with religious themes in her work, i.e. the concept of grace. At the beginning of the story the Grandmother is preoccupied with her worldy “wants,” despite the approach of imminent death. Later events would illustrate the shallowness of these people who seem to embody the self-centered, materialistic American society prior to the outbreak of World War II.

            Through her story-telling, O’Conner appears to assume the role of a preacher who wants her readers to realize that with all their worldly concerns the lives they are living are doomed for they are already in the midst of death, though none of us may be aware of it so to speak. Yet salvation is not far at hand – at the Grandmother’s moment of death the true meaning of life is revealed when she forsakes her wants and reaches out to include ‘The Misfit’ as one of her own children.

            The strange, enigmatic character of ‘The Misfit’ suggests many levels of interpretation. From the modern point of view, O’Conner may be concerned with social inequality, and the socially erected barriers between people, between those who “fit in” and those who are deviant and unaccepted, perceived as “misfits” in the community.

            Grandmother tries to play the role of the prison psychoanalyst in her attempt to explain the Oedipus complex to “The Misfit.” She ends up getting shot three times when the hostility the ‘Misfit’ does not acknowledge feeling towards his own parents is manifested in the act of destroying this family, horrified as he is with the grandmother’s claim of him as “one of her own children.”

            From a theological level of interpretation, ‘The Misfit’ appears to take things literally, which for O’Conner is exactly the heart of the problem. The man has forsworn his ties to his family by asking too many questions, consequently being defined by taking on the world and its wisdom as his personal adversary. Much like in the child John Wesley’s manner, he wants literal proof before he believes things and ideas, for experience to be made intelligible to him.

            Grandmother does not understand that the man’s alienation stems from his inability to believe in what she herself has paid lip service to all her life, and so she keeps throwing the name of Jesus at this man who has a complete albeit inadequately “rational” view of the world. His own experience goes far beyond that of the banal existence of his victims – gospel singing, plowing Mother Earth, being a tornado, undertaking, etc. Sensitive in a psychotic fashion, it is intriguing to note that he possesses the spiritual insight to recognize true belief as capable of throwing “everything off balance” (O’Conner 1894). A mere gesture of inclusion is enough to send him to a mad scramble, as if uncoiling from the touch of a poisonous snake, effectively ending the life of an old woman in the process.

            Concerning more references to biblical symbolism, perhaps the silver stallion embossed on the front of the read sweat shirt worn by one of the Misfit’s henchmen refers to mass-marketed replicas of figures with biblical significance, i.e. the pale horse which Death rides in the Book of Revelation. It leaves the reader thinking about the Bible as the Christian’s ultimate source of mystical symbols, which however, is open to a multitude, if not contradicting, of interpretations.

            “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” much like the Bible itself, or the variety of religious experience for that matter, defies simple analysis and would always remain open to new interpretations. Art, much like the postmodernist’s reality, cannot be easily organized into a coherent system, and neither are the varieties of religious experience permeating human societies.

            O’ Conner’s story makes us ponder such things, for its nature cannot be easily forgotten. It is humorous yet disturbing, and sadly tragic at the same time. Her characters slip through our consciousness, simple yet confusingly complex, grotesque yet compelling. The violence inflicted may not always make sense to the readers but much like reading an abstract painting, the convoluted pieces may not be comprehensible the first time you encounter it yet all would be integral to seeing the whole picture in its entirety.

Works Cited and Reviewed

Booth, W.C.; Colomb, C.G. & Williams, J.M. The craft of research. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995

Burke, Kenneth. Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966.

Burroughway, Jane. Writing Fiction. New York, 1995.

Currie, Sheldon. “A Good Grandmother is Hard to Find: Story as Exemplum” The Antigonish Review (Spring-Summer 1990):143-55.

O’Conner, Flannery. A Good Man is Hard to Find. 1960.

Schaub, Thomas Hill. “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” Short Story Criticism. Vol. 23. 233-235, 1990.

Shenck, Mary Jane. “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” Short Story Criticism. Vol. 23. 220-223, 1991.

Turner, B. ed. The writer’s handbook.  London: Macmillan, 2002.

Online Resources

“A Good Man is Hard to Find, by Flannery O’Connor.” 23 September 2007 <http://www.essays.cc/free_essays/c2/wuj201.shtml>

“A Good Man is Hard to Find, by Flannery O’Connor.” 23 September 2007 <http://mnmn.essortment.com/flanneryoconno_rqkk.htm>

“A Good Man is Hard to Find, by Flannery O’Connor.” 23 September 2007 <http://astro.armstrong.edu/~archerki/essay/>

“A Good Man is Hard to Find, by Flannery O’Connor.” 123HelpMe.com. 22 Sep 2007

< http://www.123HelpMe.com/view.asp?id=20160>

“A Good Man is Hard to Find, by Flannery O’Connor.” 23 September 2007

<http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~surette/goodman.html>

“A Good Man is Hard to Find, by Flannery O’Connor.” 21 September 2007

<http://english.tjc.edu/engl2333nbyr/o’connor.htm>

“A Good Man is Hard to Find, by Flannery O’Connor.” 21 September 2007 <http://www.amazon.com/Good-Hard-Find-Other-Stories/dp/0151365040>

“A Good Man is Hard to Find, by Flannery O’Connor.” 20 September 2007 http://www.littlebluelight.com/lblphp/intro.php?ikey=20

“Forshadowing Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard To Find” By Rasha El-Haggan, English Major at University of Maryland Baltimore County (Copyrighted 1998) 20 September 2007 <http://rasha.adderpit.com/flannery.html>