A Good Man is Hard to Find

903 Words2 Pages

Flannery O'Connor is an influential voice in American literature. It is the headlight of American literature, also the master of the short stories. Writer of the southern United States, we call her style the "Southern Gothic" intimately tied to its region and its grotesque characters. For me O'Connor's writings also reflect her Catholic faith, in considering her moral values. Deeply influenced by good and evil, the theme of redemption through grace and suffering, the work of Flannery O'Connor takes us to the heart of darkness of humanity. In Flannery O'Connor we find another key figure: the one of the prophet, the marginal, the one that is different from "brave people" and as such is the theme of "grotesque". The "grotesque" in Flannery O'Connor is one of the topics most discussed by literary critics. A closed reading of Flannery O’Connor “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, one of the best of her stories, reveals different levels of interpretations.

There are various critics from “A Good Man is Hard to Find." Most of those opinions target the act of the grandmother and the Misfit.

The dominating opinion is that the final part of the grandmother was one of grace and of charity, which implies that "A Good Man is Difficult To Find" was written to show a transformation in the grandmother as the history progress. In the beginning, she was more worried about the resemblance to a good Christian than to be a faithful Christian. “At lunchtime, they stop at Red Sammy’s, a barbecue eatery, where the grandmother laments that “people are certainly not nice as they used to be,” and Red Sammy agrees: “A good man is hard to find.” In this conversation, the grandmother, narrow-minded and opinionated, repeatedly assures herself that she is a lady,...

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... topped throughout history. At the end, she goes counts that she did not take good life and spreads to touch her killer, the Misfit, in a final amnesty and a charity.

Works cited

Bandy, Stephen C. "`One of My Babies': The misfit and the grandmother." Studies in Short Fiction 33.1 (1996): 107. Literary Reference Center Plus. EBSCO. Web. 29 May 2011.

Garbett, Ann D. "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition (2006): 1. Literary Reference Center Plus. EBSCO. Web. 1 June 2011.

Kaplan, Carola M. "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition (2004): 1-3. Literary Reference Center Plus. EBSCO. Web. 30 May 2011.

O'Connor, Flannery. "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." The Complete Stories. New York: Farrar, (1969). 117-33. Literary Reference Center Plus. EBSCO. Web. 1 June 2011.

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