Examples Of Grandmother In A Good Man Is Hard To Find

Dominic Caldwell Jr.

Mr. Lore

EN102-06

09-27-17

Grandmothers are known to be loving, sweet and caring old women, not this grandma. In “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” the grandmother is a very manipulative old woman. Her cynical ways of manipulation caused her family to go through a lot of torture within only a few hours. Throughout the story she manipulates her own son, Bailey, her grandchildren, John Wesley and June Star, and even a criminal who escaped from the penitentiary. Not all old women are nice; it just so happens that this one was cynical.

The grandmother starts the story by trying to manipulate her own son into traveling to a different state than usual. O`Connor in the first two sentences already shows the grandmother’s motive when

After the family got into the car and were on their way, the grandmother remembered an old house that she had went to when she was a young lady and, being selfish once again, she took it upon herself to try and convince Bailey to stop at the house. She remembered many things about the house but “knew Bailey would not be willing to lose any time looking at an old house” (189) so she sweetened the story of the house up by stating that it had “a secret panel in this house” (190). That little white lie that she happened to throw into the mix sparked the kids up like a wildfire on a hot summer day. The children started kicking and chanting that they want to go see the house that grandmother had been talking about. They wanted to see the secret panel and they wouldn’t stop until they saw it. Little did the kids know, but their own selfish grandmother who lied about the secret panel and just wanted to go there to see if her memory served her right and had just manipulated them. She made them do her bidding for her and just when she thought that they were so close to the house “a horrible thought came to her. The thought was so embarrassing that she turned red in the face and her eyes dilated…The horrible thought she had…was that the house she had remembered so vividly was not in Georgia but in Tennessee” (191). She realized her selfishness got the better of her while

After the accident that the grandmother had unintentionally caused by manipulating the image of a nonexistent house into her family’s head, they run into the Misfit. No one else in the family knew who he was or anything about him. They all thought someone had come to their rescue and was going to fix the car, but nothing gets over on the grandmother. Blatantly putting the whole family in danger she blurts out, “’You’re the Misfit!’…’Yes’m…but it would have been better for all of you, lady, if you hadn’t of reckernized me’” (192). At this point in time, she knows that she is going to die, trying to save herself and not caring about the rest of her family clearly as she has witnessed the Misfit’s goons kill off her whole family, she tries to manipulate him. She brings up that he is a “good man at heart” (192) and telling him if he “would pray…Jesus would help” (194). That was just simply her trying to plea for her life, but when she realized she was getting nowhere her “head cleared for an instant” (196), she knew this was an opportunity to try and manipulate the Misfit into letting her go, to make him feel like he didn’t have to be a killer anymore, to comfort him “she reached out and touched him on the shoulder” (196). The Misfit jolted away and shot her three times in the chest because he saw through her manipulative ways which if clear when he