Grandmother’s Folly
is considered to be one of O 'Connor 's best short stories. She relates the coldblooded murder of a family of six committed by fugitives who are led by a notorious murderer called the Misfit. This tale is noted for its spiritual traits, specifically O 'Connor 's portrayal of redemption through the appalling and violent deaths of her surreal characters. O 'Connor can be praised for her operative use of color and the comical element of her Southern upbringing, as well as her capacity to make the reader visualize the eccentric language of characters like the grandmother and the Misfit. We will spectacle about the religious devotion and level of grace the grandmother possesses in this story and her transformation at the end.
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He responds with the complaint that Jesus offered him no options between blind faith and intense oblivion, and his pain surprisingly touches the grandmother’s heart who then feels a sudden kinship to him. However, he reacts by shooting her three times in the chest as she reaches out to touch him. The grandmother 's epiphany of her connection with this lunatic belatedly saves her from a life that has been trivial, avaricious, and egotistical. Her child like expression as she falls could be seen as a sign of her sudden acceptance and transcendence to Christian grace, leaving her prone and kneeling, dead in from of the Misfit.
We, the audience, find ourselves distressed with the outcome of this horrific scene and aghast at the appalling callousness of the three men as they ruthlessly murder all of the family members, including the baby. O’Connor surely wished for the readers to become aware of what mannerisms were crucial for the family’s survival and intended for the story to rise above neat logical behavior or set moral classifications. The heart of the story makes a connection between saints and sinners, but leaves it to the each reader’s individual and diverse spiritual beliefs to derive their own
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With occasional, but poignant, allowances most will consent O 'Connor 's story, as a tale of saving grace in a decadent world.
The grandmother is selfish but also seems to be a bit senile. If you consider her manipulative acts, bringing the cat which will inevitably be discovered, forgetting which state the plantation is in and the greatest mistake of revealing her recognition of the Misfit, plus, once she actually tries to manipulate the Misfit she finds herself struggling to gain control and failing miserably. In fact, all of her tries at manipulation seem irrelevant and inappropriate because as a serial killer he probably does not flinch at shooting a lady if he has been recognized.
Even if she’s not a master manipulator she does have a selfish streak and pleads only for her own life. Even when her son is shot and she cries out his name, which could be a deliberate fake or she may be sincerely heartbroken to lose her son, but if that is true then why does she not even attempt to fight for him? It may be that while his death is agonizing, her primary thought is self-preservation. If you view her as simply a peculiar old lady, rather than a diabolical genius, you may detect signs she is in shock and not thinking clearly about what she is doing. Perhaps she feels incapable to save her family as her calls to Baily seem to imply, or maybe she hopes to save her family as well as
From the beginning, the author introduces the grandmother and right off you see how she wishes they could take a trip to where she used to live, she tries every chance she gets to change the plans for the trip with her only son. ?Here this fellow that calls himself The Misfit is aloose from the Federal Pen and headed toward Florida,? ?I wouldn?t take my children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it.? As they drive and they talk, everything she says toward someone else is always a put down, towards the people they see and the people in the car. She sees a little ?Nigger? boy and comments ?Little Nigger?s in the country don?t have things like we do?.
Although this story is told in the third person, the reader’s eyes are strictly controlled by the meddling, ever-involved grandmother. She is never given a name; she is just a generic grandmother; she could belong to anyone. O’Connor portrays her as simply annoying, a thorn in her son’s side. As the little girl June Star rudely puts it, “She has to go everywhere we go. She wouldn’t stay at home to be queen for a day” (117-118). As June Star demonstrates, the family treats the grandmother with great reproach. Even as she is driving them all crazy with her constant comments and old-fashioned attitude, the reader is made to feel sorry for her. It is this constant stream of confliction that keeps the story boiling, and eventually overflows into the shocking conclusion. Of course the grandmother meant no harm, but who can help but to blame her? O’Connor puts her readers into a fit of rage as “the horrible thought” comes to the grandmother, “that the house she had remembered so vividly was not in Georgia but in Tennessee” (125).
She tells him "You 've got good blood". All her begging proved futile as she was shot. To me, her ultimate point was when said she would have Mr. Teagarden. Mr. Teagarden died wealthy from buying a Coca-Cola stock when the business started. The way she said that it seems as if she wanted to marry him because he had money rather loving him for being a gentleman.
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.
It can inferred that The Misfit,being a convict, has either maimed or killed the people that the grandmother mentions. The Misfit relays his life to the grandmother before he shoots her, talking about how he killed his father, even though he can’t remember it. He’s not ashamed of any of his crimes because he believes that the punishment is all the same, even saying that you can “kill a man or take a tire off his care, because sooner or later you’re going to forget what it was...and just be punished for it,” (719). Later, while The Misfit is talking to the grandmother, he tells her about his doubt in Jesus. Without proof of Jesus’s feats, he tells her that there’s nothing to do in the end except enjoy it “by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness,” (720). In the end, after shooting the grandmother, he still denies God and therefore doesn’t receive God’s grace.
With these two divergent personas that define the grandmother, I believe the ultimate success of this story relies greatly upon specific devices that O’Connor incorporates throughout the story; both irony and foreshadowing ultimately lead to a tale that results in an ironic twist of fate and also play heavily on the character development of the grandmother. The first sense of foreshadowing occurs when the grandmother states “[y]es and what would you do if this fellow, The Misfit, Caught you” (1042). A sense of gloom and an unavoidable meeting with the miscreant The Misfit seem all but inevitable. I am certain that O’Connor had true intent behind th...
O’Connor emphasized human problem and use spiritual words to connect the grandmother character with everyone. This family uses a traditional vacation that families go on every year to show daily problem, attitudes and emotion while on a road trip. O’Connor use language in the South to tell the story. I think the grandmother use various types of language to express her thoughts and feeling. The author push the audiences to feel the amount of pride the grandmother have when it comes to identifying what she wants. O’Connor shows how dominant the grandmother is when she does an excellent job in persuading the family to go where she wants to go. This is a perfect example of the amount of manipulate the grandmother use throughout the story.
...d both of them do not quite understand what being saved actually means. In the end, “when she saw the man’s face twisted close to her own (367).” the grandmother realizes that she and The Misfit are both on the same level and she is no worse than the latter. Almost like taking a look into a mirror and pondering upon one’s own reflection. The story takes a quick pause, when the author writes the line, “His voice seemed to crack and the grandmother’s head cleared for an instance (367).” What were the thoughts that went through the grandmother’s head? What happened during the “instance” that changed the grandmother’s view on her beliefs? The sole purpose of the phrase drowns a reader with questions and uncertainty. The story makes a final closure with The Misfit’s remark on how his source of happiness by performing violent acts brings “no real pleasure in life.”
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.
... story as it shows the grandmother and her family’s lives have no importance until their encounter with the Misfit. Furthermore, O’Connor develops both her main characters, the grandmother and the Misfit, primarily through the structure of her disarrayed and segmented storyline with the intention of exposing her theme to her audience.
Last but not least, O’Connor confirms that even a short story is a multi-layer compound that on the surface may deter even the most enthusiastic reader, but when handled with more care, it conveys universal truths by means of straightforward or violent situations. She herself wished her message to appeal to the readers who, if careful enough, “(…)will come to see it as something more than an account of a family murdered on the way to Florida.”
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 not godly, prayerful, or trustworthy but she is a troublesome character. She raised her children without spirutuality, because she is not a believer, she is Godless.
O’Connor powerfully made the reader realize that having an epiphany opens up our mind to a clearer insight, and this was seen with the grandmother in “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and Mrs. Turpin in “Revelation.” Nonetheless, O’Connor also created characters that obtained a certain type of violence deep within their personality to show the importance of real life experiences within our society. These two short stories show a great amount of emotion and life lessons towards the reader, and O’Connor successfully conveyed her point while using her powerful Southern gothic writing technique.
O’Connor is quoted as saying “violence is strangely capable of returning characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace”. In all three of these stories the character’s usually at the end accept reality as what it is and take their moment of grace. Moments of grace can happen anywhere at any time, and often times happens because of a violent or traumatic event.