A Good Man Is Hard To Find Rhetorical Analysis

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Everyone is faced with decisions and choices in life, and sometimes they are combined with impelling and inevitable consequences. Flannery O'Connor’s religiously symbolic short story "A Good Man is Hard to Find" portrays a family of unappreciative adults and children traveling to Florida for a vacation. While traveling the family has an unfortunate accident and encounter a wanted and deadly criminal named The Misfit. As they are forced to face their own destruction, the grandmother attempts to find some mercy in the misfit to prevent her own death and subsequent Judgment. O’Conner in “A Good Man Is Hard To Find”, skillfully uses noticeable foreshadowing, elaborate symbolism, and dramatic irony to portray the message that people sometimes experience …show more content…

In several different scenarios, the grandmother is shown as manipulative, snobbish, and slightly senile and judges based on appearance. For example, when the family meets Red Sam at the gas station, he mentions his tendency to allow complete strangers to charge gas, and he is curious why he would allow strangers like the grandmother to do so, and the grandmother replies, "Because you're a good man" (427). The grandmother makes this determination with a very small amount of knowledge of who Red Sam is, and without any information or significant insight about him as a person. Additionally, after the accident happens and the misfit makes his first appearance, the grandmother immediately notices his ability to put the family at ease with genuine kindness. This evaluation by the grandmother motivates her to compliment the dangerous criminal, and she even goes as far to call him a good man. While it is likely she is just attempting to earn approval with the misfit, it is still another example of the grandmother making shallow generalizations based on outward appearances and behavior without knowing the person. Furthermore, irony is strategically placed in the story when the grandmother encounters the misfit and calls out to him that he was her baby, indicating that she saw herself mirrored in the demeanor of the misfit. Consequently, the misfit mentions that she would have been a good woman, “If there had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life”

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