A Good Man Is Hard to Find and A Rose for Emily Analysis

William Faulkner and Flannery O’ Conner both have mischievous and morbid characteristics. In Flannery O’Conner’s story, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, the main focus is that the grandma is old fashioned and uses this to her advantage in telling stories and trying not to get killed. In William Faulkner’s story, A Rose for Emily, it focuses on Emily who is also old fashioned but can’t get with the present time and keeps holding onto the past. Both have morbid endings because of their lack of letting go on past events, and use their archaic habits in different ways. In A Rose for Emily, Emily shows multiple signs of not liking change by denying her father’s death, not leaving the house and in A Good Man Is Hard to Find; the grandmother portrays the right way of being a lady, and her jokes associating with the plantation and the Negro child.
Firstly, in both stories they both have different aspects of Negroes. For instance, In A Rose for Emily, we learn of Emily having a Negro servant (79). This could infer or symbolize that she doesn’t have respect or think of Blacks as equals. In A Good Man Is Hard to Find, as if in compliance with Emily, the grandmother in the story has several instances of her talking about Negroes. She talks about a Black child she sees at a shack that they go to stating that the child “probably didn’t have any britches” and going on saying “little niggers in the country don’t have things like we do” (187). She also states while looking outside that the graveyard that her family had “belonged to the plantation” she then jokes saying that the plantation is “Gone with the Wind” when John Wesley asked about it (188). As they were in the automobile, she tells a story to the kids that when she was younger there was a m...

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...xes in Jefferson. (80).” Above all, she never leaves her house. The only person to leave the house is her Negro servant, Tobe, and that is for chores and what not. This contradicts a little with the grandmother from A Good Man Is Hard to Find who is very prudent as to what she looks like and wears.
The two stories A Rose for Emily and A Good Man Is Hard to Find differ more than they do correspondingly. Although they have similar endings, both have morbid thoughts both in the story itself and at the end. They share similarities in their thoughts of Blacks/ African Americans, but have their differences when it comes to their image as a lady. In conclusion, both Miss Emily and the grandmother can not let go of the past and go into the present which does not allow them to accept change easily. This further complicates their lives ending up in their melancholy deaths.