Selfishness In A Good Man Is Hard To Find

Have you ever met someone who cares so much about the way they look or how people perceive them that they can’t even focus on reality? In the story, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” Flannery O’Connor uses character to show no matter how nice you are during your lifetime, when it comes down to the evil people, there is no way to escape death. It reveals how one’s selfishness and unwillingness to accept one’s boundaries can lead to the running of not only one’s life but also many people around them.
Flannery O’Connor uses the character of the grandmother to show the danger of self- centeredness. The grandmother says that her conscience is a guiding force in life, for example when she is reading the newspaper and sees that there is a misfit on the loose and reads what he has been doing to people. She was not going to allow herself nor her family to be anywhere near a criminal (Line # 7). The grandmother, who compares the mother’s face to a cabbage, criticizes the mother for not letting her children be broad and suggest that they go on a trip to east Tennessee rather than Florida where the misfit is (Line #10). John Wesley, who is her grandson, says “if you don’t want to go to Florida, why don’t you stay at home?’ and the grandmother chastises
As you can see, the grandmother was very quick to judge everyone and was never critical on herself inspecting her own hypocrisy, dishonesty and selfishness. Only when she is in her final moments of life, before the misfit kills her, does she then realize where she has gone wrong in her life and she is just like everyone else nothing more and nothing less. Planning a crime requires a lot of time, along with patience. To have good morals once must learn from mistakes and accept the punishment that comes along with it no matter