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The summary of the good man is hard to find by flannery o'conner
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I found this to be one of the more interesting stories that I have read during this course. question why does the grandmother have bad luck, or is this just irony or karma? Was it this family’s destiny to be killed by this so called Miss-Fit or was this just an act of chance. Maybe we can look at it from the angle that I concluded, was this brought upon the family by a grandmother’s selfishness. I will argue that this was not a story about a chance encounter, but this is what was meant to be. The story almost starts out that would lead the reader to think it is a comedy. The story starts with the grandmother only thinking about what she selfishly wanted to do for the family trip. That was to go to Tennessee instead of Florida, she did not want a chance encounter with the Mis-Fit. The Mis-Fit is a violent prisoner that is locked away in the Florida penitentiary. At this point in the story I would ask, are there any chance of an encounter with a prisoner that is locked up. This will set the tone for the story in my opinion, the grandmother would like to manipulate the family. When the grandmother is confronted about the reason she should not go to Florida she quickly changes her tone,”If you don’t want to go why dontcha stay at home”? John Wesley said “She wouldn’t stay at home for million bucks. Then June Star states “Afraid she’d miss something”. “She has to go everywhere we go”
(Norton p.423)Even the children understood that the grandmother is being manipulative and uses it against her. Now let’s take a look at the first few sentences of this story to see that this story. I will then explain how this was not a simple story of chance. The grandmother starts to read the Journal, about the Mis-Fit. She asked th...
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...n that saw her entire family murdered and still only thought about herself until the end. As for the Mis-Fit, he was only what he was, just like the grandmother. They were destined to cross paths and in the end grandma could not manipulate the one person she needed to so desperately. There is a saying “don’t speak it into existence,” the grandmother did just that.
Works Cited
Sally Fitzgerald. O'Connor, Flannery. "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works. Ed. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1988. 137-53.
Shorter Eleventh Edition,The Norton Introduction to Literature,
Ted Sherman 1:27:12 Lecture on Flannery O’ Conner “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”
Woodward, Robert. "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." NCL 3.5 (1973): 2-5.7
...was a desperate act of a lonely, insane woman who could not bear to loose him. The structure of this story, however, is such that the important details are delivered in almost random order, without a clear road map that connects events. The ending comes as a morbid shock, until a second reading of the story reveals the carefully hidden details that foreshadow the logical conclusion.
A brilliant storyteller during the mid-twentieth century, Flannery O'Connor wrote intriguing tales of morality, ethics and religion. A Southern writer, she wrote in the Southern Gothic style, cataloging thirty-two short stories; the most well known being “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”
Bandy, Stephen C. "One of my babies": The Misfit and the Grandmother in Flannery O'Connor's short story 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find'. Studies in Short Fiction; Winter 1996, v33, n1, p107(11)
Author Armond Boudreaux makes a valid point in the article “There Are No Good Men to Find.” He states how “The grandmother believes in her power of dress and Southern manners to prove her dignity and superiority; she disguises her racism in kindly condescension (page 151).“ He also discusses the topic in the short story, “Compared with her hollow faith in Jesus--- whom she invokes only to save her own life (page 151).” Armond also states“ pity at best for the grandmother, and when her moment of beatitude and her ecstatic last words signal that she has received grace she has lacked all her life ---“You’re one of my own children!”--- We may quite rightly feel bewildered and even outraged (page 152). Armond goes on discussing how grandmother was hoping she could use her southern belle charm, to regain power over the situation.
There are three phases of thought for the Grandmother. During the first phase, which is in the beginning, she is completely focused on herself in relation to how others think of her. The Second Phase occurs when she is speaking to The Misfit. In the story, The Misfit represents a quasi-final judgment. He does this by acting like a mirror. He lets whatever The Grandmother says bounce right off him. He never really agrees with her or disagrees, and in the end he is the one who kills her. His second to last line, "She would of been a good woman," The Misfit said, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life," (O'Conner 152). might be the way O'Conner felt about most of us alive, or how she felt that God must feel about us.
They may even often immolate the same exact thing they see or hear from an adult. However, O’Connor puts the focus on the grandmother’s bad behavior to highlight her fate at the end of the story. Readers think the grandmother is a good person character because they relate her to their own grandmother. The grandmother puts her hand on the Misfit at the end of the story because she wants to try one also time to beg for her life. When she went on about the Misfit being a good person she was also begging fir help because she knew she was
...anger that The Misfit reveals throughout the story draws sympathy from the grandmother and even from the reader. He believes that if he had actually witnessed Jesus firsthand raising the dead he would be a complete believer and a better person: “I wisht I had of been there. It ain’t right I wasn’t there because if I had of been there I would of known and I wouldn’t be like I am now” (267). The Misfit’s strong and consistent beliefs are what seem to guide his actions and when the grandmother recognizes his strength she finally recognizes her weaknesses and undergoes a sudden change of heart, reaching out to the man who killed those she loved and is about to kill her. That final act of kindness by the grandmother may have struck home with The Misfit who, after declaring that there is no pleasure but meanness, decides “It’s no real pleasure in life” (267).
The grandmother is the central character in the story "A good man is hard to find," by Flannery O'Connor. The grandmother is a manipulative, deceitful, and self-serving woman who lives in the past. She doesn't value her life as it is, but glorifies what it was like long ago when she saw life through rose-colored glasses. She is pre-scented by O'Connor as being a prim and proper lady dressed in a suit, hat, and white cotton gloves. This woman will do whatever it takes to get what she wants and she doesn't let anyone else's feelings stand in her way. She tries to justify her demands by convincing herself and her family that her way is not only the best way, but the only way. The grandmother is determined to change her family's vacation destination as she tries to manipulate her son into going to Tennessee instead of Florida. The grandmother says that "she couldn't answer to her conscience if she took the children in a direction where there was a convict on the loose." The children, they tell her "stay at home if you don't want to go." The grandmother then decides that she will have to go along after all, but she is already working on her own agenda. The grandmother is very deceitful, and she manages to sneak the cat in the car with her. She decides that she would like to visit an old plantation and begins her pursuit of convincing Bailey to agree to it. She describes the old house for the children adding mysterious details to pique their curiosity. "There was a secret panel in this house," she states cunningly knowing it is a lie. The grandmother always stretches the truth as much as possible. She not only lies to her family, but to herself as well. The grandmother doesn't live in the present, but in the past. She dresses in a suit to go on vacation. She states, "in case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady." She constantly tries to tell everyone what they should or should not do. She informs the children that they do not have good manners and that "children were more respectful of their native states and their parents and everything else." when she was a child.
O?Connor, Flannery. ?A Good Man is Hard to Find.? Literature: An introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. 8th ed. New York: Longman, 2002.
O'Connor, Flannery. "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." The Story and Its Writer An Introduction to Short Fiction. 8th ed. Boston: Bedford / St. Martin's, 2011. 1042-053. Print.
Since the beginning of the story, the readers have come to known the grandmother as a spiteful old lady due to her repulsive and deceitful attitudes toward others. Right from the start, we can see the grandmother using her manipulative tactics on her family. “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 1) This initial quote shows an early indication that the grandmother is determined to obtain whatever she wants and will not allow anything to get in her way, even if it means manipulating her own family. This line already suggests that the grandmother may have sly motives concealed in her mind. “Here this fellow that calls himself The Misfit is a loose from the Federal Pen a...
The grandmother is very old and has lived a very tough life in Vietnam. She “‘lost four of [her] children… twelve of [her] grandchildren and countless relatives to wars and famines’” (Meyer, 74) while in Vietnam. During her life she had very little time to enjoy herself, instead she had to focus on not only surviving, but also holding a family together and getting them through the hardships as well. On top of the Vietnam War, which killed an estimated 500,000-600,000 Vietnamese citizens alone (Weisner), she had to live through 2 additional wars and several famines. The implicated stress and hardships are almost unimaginable. This is evident in her stories and fairy tales she tells her granddaughters, which always have dark twist or no happy ending, or as the granddaughters say “The husband comes too late” (Meyer, 77) to stop the bad guy or save the
She only cares for herself and uses her manipulative skills to trick the other characters into doing what she wants. However, she views herself to be of higher moral standings than the other characters. If the grandmother has any lesson for the reader, the lesson is that no matter how tricky one is or how high one holds their standards to be, not everyone gets their way all the
O'Connor, Flannery. ?Good Country People.? A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories. Comp. Flannery O'Connor. San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company, [2006?].
Flannery O’ Connor’s story: “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is the tale of a vacation gone wrong. The tone of this story is set to be one irony. The story is filled with grotesque but meaningful irony. I this analysis I will guide you through the clues provided by the author, which in the end climax to the following lesson: “A Good Man” is not shown good by outward appearance, language, thinking, but by a life full of “good” actions.