Exploring Characters and Themes in A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor

Exploring Characters in "A Good Man is Hard to Find"

Flannery O'Connor once said of her writing, "All my stories are about the action of grace on a character that is not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories as hard, hopeless and brutal." This statement is especially true when matched with O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find," in which character plays such an essential role within the story. Through her characters, particularly the Grandmother and the Misfit, O'Conner manages to inject many elements; the characters embody symbols and themes such as O'Brien's message of Christianity.

The primary character in this story is the Grandmother whose epiphany at the end of the story gives the religious and moral push that is underlying the actual text. O'Conner leaves the Grandmother's character unnamed; by doing this and infusing cantankerous dialogue, O'Connor manages to provide the story with wit and sketch a both sad and funny portrait of the Grandmother. The Grandmother's character is one that is both frustrating to the reader and familiar at the same time--a character that the reader can feel superior, especially at the beginning of the story. The Grandmother is self-centered, demanding, and haughty--it is indeed her domineering demeanor that ultimately causes the death of her family.

The Grandmother's superior attitude is exemplified in her treatment of the children's mother, to whom she is extremely disapproving, and while there is a certain affection given to Bailey, "her only boy" she behaves as though he is a small child. Bailey, like all of the characters other than the Misfit, is important only in relation to the Grandmother; their relationship and the interactions between t...

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...s: the Misfit, of this story and of society, is the one who often looks past the artificial. Although there are many critics who disagree with this interpretation of the Misfit, like Gary Sloan who writes in his article, "O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find," "the Misfit remains essentially a lapsed fundamentalist locked into incarnational models of deity," he is a character that can easily represent both. And certainly, "A Good Man is Hard to Find," a story whose simplistic finely crafted surface hides an abundance of religious and social ideas, there will always be another elucidation.

Works Cited

Hendm, Josephine. The World of Flannery O'Connor, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970.

Simpson, Melissa. Flannery O'Connor: A Biography. New York: Greenwood, 2005.

Sloan, Gary. "O'Conner's A Good Man is Hard to Find" Explicator 23.2 (199): 118-120.