A Path to Enlightenment

If you knew your moment was coming soon what would you do? Would you go out and party it up or would you repent every second leading up to your last breath? People go throughout life not knowing when their last moment will be. For the Grandmother in Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find, religion was her last resort to save her own skin. Before embarking on a family trip, the grandmother did everything in her power to change the mind of her son, Bailey, with whom she lived, about the location of their destination. She went so far as to bring up a newspaper article she had read about an escaped convict named The Misfit. Little did she know that in the end she her hypocritical ways would inevitably lead to the death of her entire family; “In the final scene, the Grandmother meets her narcisstic match, who just so happens to be a sociopathic killer (Caverlee 964)” and leads her entire family to an inevitable fate: death.

What is a hypocrite? In this story, the grandmother is quite possibly the best example of a hypocrite that you could ask for. The grandmother, in others minds, would read as the mind of a wholesome, Christian woman. When analyzed by some teachers she is thought to be evil, but students disagree with this because “they resisted it because they all had grandmothers or great-aunts just like her at home and they knew, from personal experience that the old lady lacked comprehension” (O’Connor 944). She was a manipulative and shallow old woman. While the rest of the family prepared to set out on the journey casually dressed, the grandmother sat between the kids in the back seat dressed in “a navy blue straw sailor hat with a bunch of white violets on the brim and a navy blue dress with a small white dot in the ...

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...htenment, found at the end of this piece, is the concept that most people seem to grasp towards the end as the grandmother “half sat and half lay … with her legs crossed under her like a child’s and her face smiling up at the cloudless sky” (O’Connor 942). In sign showing salvation all while realizing, “It’s no real pleasure in life” (O’Connor 942).

Works Cited

Caverlee, William. “The Critic at Work.” The Writer’s Presence. Ed Donald McQuade and Robert Atwan. 7th ed. Boston and New York: Bedford St. Martin’s, 2012. 946-948. Print.

O’Connor, Flannery. “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” The Writer’s Presence. Ed Donald McQuade and Robert Atwan. 7th ed. Boston and New York: Bedford St. Martin’s, 2012. 930-942. Print.

---. “The Writer at Work.” The Writer’s Presence. Ed Donald McQuade and Robert Atwan. 7th ed. Boston and New York: Bedford St. Martin’s, 2012. 943-945. Print.