Through Redemption Shines God’s Grace: Analysis of Symbolism in “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor

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Recommended: Literary elements of "a good man is hard to find

“A Good Man is hard to Find”, by Flannery O’Connor uses a plethora of religious and sacrilegious symbolic aspects to deliver the defining moral to this short story. Through such symbols as the color gray, the clouds in the sky, circular objects, the hats worn by the main characters, The Misfits spectacles, and the identifying snake used as a simile all contain the underlining Catholic Stoicism and ideology of Jesus Christ the redeemer and the divine grace of God.
The color gray associated with loss symbolizes ash and repentance. Pitty Sing, the grandmother’s cat was a gray stripped with a broad white face. The gray monkey outside Red Sammy’s, The Tower was chained to a chinaberry tree. Red Sammy wiped the sweat from his face with a gray handkerchief. The Misfits hair was beginning to gray. Hiram, The Misfits accomplice who murdered the family wore a gray hat. When Bobby Lee escorted Bailey to the woods, Bailey turned leaning on a gray naked pine trunk. The color gray O’Connor uses to paint a vivid image of the battle of spirituality the main characters go through represent the median between light and dark, light being the Heavens and dark representing Hell.
Scenic symbolism is used in the description of the sky. John Wesley and June Star play a game of guessing the shapes of the clouds, fighting over that was right on the road trip. The Misfit later remarks “Ain’t a cloud in the sky, don’t see no sun but don’t see no cloud neither” (O’Connor 315). Clouds symbolize the heavens as a natural veil of blue sky and the unseen God. The Sun symbolizes a holy light from the heavens, God. The instant the grandmother receives grace and reaches out a hand to The Misfit, she is shot three times “half sat and half lay in a puddle of blood ...

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... is hard to Find.” Clearly symbolism is used more frequently with the Catholic undertones. O’Connor consciously shows how the grandmothers divine moment of grace she receives in the moment of violence she extends her hand, as if God was reaching out to The Misfit as an invitation to receive the grace of God for we are all God’s children. The grandmother and The Misfit live their lives to a moral code away from the religious beliefs instilled in them through family and need violence to repent and be shown the grace of God.

Works Cited

McMullen, Joanne. Writing against God: Language as Message in the Literature of Flannery O’Connor. Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1996.

O’Connor, Flannery. “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing. Ed. X.J. Kennedy and Diana Gioia. Boston: Pearson, 2013. 309-318. Print.

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