Analysis of A Good Man Is Hard to Find

Analysis on A Good Man Is Hard to Find
American writer Flannery O’Connor particularly acclaimed for her stories which combined comic with tragic and brutal, belonged to the Southern Gothic tradition group that focused on the decaying South. Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, the only child of a Catholic family. The region was part of the 'Christ-haunted' Bible belt of the Southern States. The spiritual heritage of the region shaped profoundly O'Connor's writing. O'Connor's short stories have been considered her finest work. With A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories, she came to be regarded as a master of the form. The following passages will devote to a detailed analysis of her famous A Good Man Is Hard to Find.
The whole story is connected by a journey in the family car. There are a grandmother, her son and daughter-in-law and their three children. They encounter an escaped criminal called the Misfit and his two killers, Hiram and Bobby Lee. The family is casually wiped out by them when the grandmother recognizes the Misfit from his ''Wanted'' poster. When the hallucinating grandmother murmurs: "Why you're one of my babies. You're one of my own children!", The Misfit shoots her and says: "She would of been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." At first, it may be difficult to follow O'Connor's train of thought as to where she was headed in her stories. However, upon a second and even a third glance, the almost hidden themes and meanings behind the stories appeared and the readers are presented with a very vivid picture of Southern life, religion, and just life in general. O'Connor explores human nature and the turns it can take. The religious undertones emphasize her beliefs that man cannot save himself by relying upon the arm of flesh.
The most outstanding character in this story is the grandmother, and since the story is told from the third person omniscient view, it will be easy for us to analyze the grandmother’s character. She connects the other characters together throughout the story with her own selfishness and stupidity. As the story opens, the scene is set in the home of a man named Bailey and his family which consists of his mother (the grandmother), his wife and their two children—June Star and John Wesley. Bailey is planning a trip to Florida, but the grandmother would rather go to Tennessee. We see the first sign of the grandmother’s selfishness here when she tries to convince her son, Bailey, to take the family to Tennessee. She does her persuasion through a newspaper article which says that a convict called The Misfit has escaped from the Federal
Penitentiary. The references to the possibility of the grandmother's cat’s dying (noticing the five or six graves in a field) suggests that if she leaves it at home, it may avoid a highway accident, which reveals the stupidity of the grandmother. The Misfit is as important a character as the grandmother but with more strangeness. At the beginning of the story, we learn about the grandmother that "Bailey was the son she lived with," suggesting the possibility of another son. Later she stands over her son's balding head with "one hand on her thin hip and the other rattling the newspaper" and warns him about The Misfit. Besides, The Misfit is called Misfit because O'Connor wants to show that The Misfit's tendency to take things literally is the theological heart of the problem. He has a depth of experience as shown in his listing of occupations--gospel singing, undertaking, plowing "Mother Earth," being in a tornado, seeing a man burnt and a woman flogged--that goes far beyond the banal experience of his victims. Sensitive and psychotic, he has the spiritual insight to recognize that true belief throws "everything off balance" (p. 1894), just as we, the readers, are thrown off balance by what we see happen.
To make the story vivid and description lifelike, O’Connor has dialogue description dominating the whole story and proper scenery description is also adopted as indispensable element. A good amount of dialogue is employed in order to connect the whole journey and to drive forward the development of the plot as well as to reveal the personality of each character. The story also ends with a dialogue between The Misfit and Bobby Lee:
“She would of been a good woman," The Misfit said, "if it had
been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."
"Some fun!" Bobby Lee said.
"Shut up, Bobby Lee" The Misfit said. "It's no real pleasure in life."
Through the dialogue, we see a desperate creature compelled to kill people under his unconsciousness. And such brutal behavior is ironically covered with philosophical thinking and a gradual realization of life. Scenery description also devotes to the depiction of a decaying South:
Outside of Toombsboro she woke up and recalled an old plantation
that she had visited in this neighborhood once when she was a
young lady. She said the house had six white columns across the
front and that there was an avenue of oaks leading up to it and two
little wooden trellis arbors on either side in front where you sat
down with your suitor after a stroll in the garden.
This is a traditional description of the South in which old plantation and oaks are the traditional images of the old South. However, the name of Toombsboro reminds the readers of a big somber tomb. Similarly, the "burnt brown" owner's wife, the flea-catching monkey, and the animal guard all are reminders of a Dante-Inferno landscape. The scenery description provides a mood that the family is doomed to come to an end of their lives and that no life is supposed to make a living in such environment.
O’Connor employs several of figures of speech among which symbolism and repetition are outstanding elements. The grandmother keeps throwing the name of Jesus at The Misfit, but her persuasion turns to be a failure on The Misfit. The Misfit’s need for verification traps him in an inadequate "rational" view of the world. There is a symbol of religion by presenting the image of Jesus. O'Connor lets the children reiterate their own delight in having had an ACCIDENT precisely because, one suspects, she would have us understand that there are no accidents in God's plan. Besides, the title of this story symbolizes the whole process of life, but life can be finished simply because of an accident. There is belief during one’s life, but what we see in this story is the destruction of such religious belief. Moreover, the repetition of “a good man is hard to find”suggests a troubled society and the difficulty of establishing a belief and trust among people. It also comes up with the question: what is a “good man”. A good man truly is hard to find, but perhaps that is the point. O’Connor’s religious background becomes apparent as the reader continually sees the lives of her characters ruined because they tried to rely too heavily upon the mortal things and became engulfed in pride.
A Good Man Is Hard To Find is a deceptively easily read story which may make readers laugh and laugh, for O'Connor captures a certain essence of southern life as few people have. But in the midst of the laughter, if we read carefully, we also realize that the story invites debate about the meaning of "a good man," about the meaning of the events with which it includes, and about the meaning of our existence in the universe.。