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Analysis of Flannery O'Connor's Story, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find
Themes of A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O Connor Essay
Analysis of Flannery O'Connor's Story, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find
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It is a given that Flannery O’Connor is one of the most recognized southern female writers. This is mostly due to the pure religious content and reality in her writings. One of those stories, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” is one that combines her love of religion with her personal experience. It is a story on which its simple beginning tricks the reader, and its complex ending brings both questions and tears. What looks like just a field trip vacation turns into an unnecessary massacre for the purpose of understanding both religion and the human race. In “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” O’Connor is able to leave impressions of her life on the location, characters, and scenes by the use of her love of religion and life experiences.
Most of her life, Flannery O’Connor traveled around the United States, yet most of her life was spent in a place near Milledgeville, Georgia (May 17). On this detail, we can infer that it was no coincidence that she picked Georgia as her starting location for the story. It was a town she knew best, and could certainly describe to the perfection any places that she would’ve wanted to add. In the case of the story, O’Connor only describes one place, The Tower, and a little restaurant inside it where the family dines in. “The tower was a part stucco and part filling station and dance hall set in a clearing outside the Timothy” (O’Connor 302). Deferring from this description, O’Connor must have been in that place at least ten times; because a person who has never been to Georgia could never know what The Tower, its location and the Timothy were, nor would they have been able to guess on such a place. O’Connor included some of her life settings in order to make the story’s setting more realistic and credib...
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...ically with “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” Flannery O’Connor shows her biography to the world, and keeps her identity hidden while making a realistic story that we can all learn and ponder about.
Works Cited
"Flannery O’Connor." Georgia Literary Festival. Georgia College and state University, 12 Dec 2000. Web. 27 Mar 2012. .
Magee, Rosemary M. Conversations with Flannery O'Connor. Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 1987. 5-10. Print.
May, Charles “Career, Life, and Influence” Critical Insights Flannery O'Connor. 1st edition. Salem Press, 2012. 3-22. Print.
O’Connor Flannery “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” The Norton Introduction To Literature. Shorter 10th ed. Booth, Alison, and Kelly J. Mays. New York, London: W.W. Norton & Co Inc., 2010. 299-310. Print.
Feeley, Kathleen, S.S.N.D. Flannery O'Connor: Voice of the Peacock. New York: Fordham University Press; 2 edition, 2010.
Wrestling, Louise. “Flannery O'Connor's Mothers and Daughters.” Twentieth Century Literature 24.4 (1978): 510-522. JSTOR. Web. 22 Nov. 2011.
Mary Flannery O'Connor was born on March 25, 1925, in Savannah, Georgia. Raised in her mother's family home in Milledgeville, Georgia, she was the only child of Regina Cline and Edward Francis O'Connor, Jr. Although little is known about Mrs. O'Connor's early childhood, in Melissa Simpson's biography on O'Connor, Simpson states that O'Connor attended St. Vincent's Grammar School in Savannah where she would rarely play with the other children and spent most her time reading by herself. After fifth, grade, O'Connor transferred; to Sacred Heart Grammar School for Girls; some say the reason for the transfer was that it was a more prestigious school than the former. She later enrolled in Peabody High School in 1938, entered an accelerated program at Georgia State Collge for Women in the summer of 1942, and in 1946 she was accepted into the Iowa Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa (4 Simpson). According to American Decades, O'Connor earned her masters degree from the University of Iowa with six short-stories that were published in the periodical Accent (n pg Baughman).
Flannery O’Connor is a master of the ironic, the twisted, and the real. Life is filled with tragic irony, and she perfectly orchestrates situations which demonstrate this to the fullest extent. A Good Man is Hard to Find is an excellent example of the mangled viewpoint which makes her work as compelling and striking as it is.
To conclude, Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” is filled with irony and it is what makes the story so interesting. Without the use of these ironies the story would have been very different for the readers. Flannery O’Connor uses irony to enhance her writing and to push the readers to want to read further. She also uses this irony to explain some of her own concerns about the human condition. Verbal, dramatic, and cosmic ironies are all present in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” and are used skillfully by the author to enhance the reader’s experience.
Scott, Nathan A., Jr. "Flannery O'Connor's Testimony." The Added Dimension: The Art and Mind of Flannery O'Connor. Ed. Melvin J. Friedman and Lewis A. Lawson. New York: Fordham UP, 1966. 138-56.
Flannery O’Connor, undoubtedly one of the most well-read authors of the early 20th Century, had many strong themes deeply embedded within all her writings. Two of her most prominent and poignant themes were Christianity and racism. By analyzing, “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and “Everything that Rises Must Converge,” these two themes jump out at the reader. Growing up in the mid-1920’s in Georgia was a huge influence on O’Connor. Less than a decade before her birth, Georgia was much different than it was at her birth. Slaves labored tirelessly on their master’s plantations and were indeed a facet of everyday life. However, as the Civil War ended and Reconstruction began, slaves were not easily assimilated into Southern culture. Thus, O’Connor grew up in a highly racist area that mourned the fact that slaves were now to be treated as “equals.” In her everyday life in Georgia, O’Connor encountered countless citizens who were not shy in expressing their discontent toward the black race. This indeed was a guiding influence and inspiration in her fiction writing. The other guiding influence in her life that became a major theme in her writing was religion. Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia, the only child of a Catholic family. The region was part of the 'Christ-haunted' Bible belt of the Southern States. The spiritual heritage of the region profoundly shaped O'Connor's writing as described in her essay "The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South" (1969). Many of her 32 short stories are inundated with Christ-like allusions and other references to her faith.
Cofer, Jordan. "Flannery O'connor's Role In Popular Culture: A Review Essay." Southern Quarterly 47.2 (2010): 140-157. OmniFile Full Text Mega (H.W. Wilson). Web. 2 Nov. 2013.
Flannery O’Connor lived most of her life in the southern state of Georgia. When once asked what the most influential things in her life were, she responded “Being a Catholic and a Southerner and a writer.” (1) She uses her knowledge of southern religion and popular beliefs to her advantage throughout the story. Not only does she thoroughly depict the southern dialect, she uses it more convincingly than other authors have previously attempted such as Charles Dickens and Zora Neale Hurston. In other works, the authors frequently use colloquialism so “local” that a reader not familiar with those slang terms, as well as accents, may have difficulty understanding or grasping the meaning of the particular passage. O’Connor not only depicts a genuine southern accent, she allows the characters to maintain some aspect of intelligence, which allows the audience to focus on the meaning of the passage, rather than the overbearing burden of interpreting a rather “foreign language.”
O'Connor, Flannery. "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." The Story and Its Writer An Introduction to Short Fiction. 8th ed. Boston: Bedford / St. Martin's, 2011. 1042-053. Print.
1) O’Connor, Flannery, A Good Man Is Hard to Find (Women Writers: Text & Contexts Series). Rutgers University Press, 1993.
Flannery O’ Connor’s story: “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is the tale of a vacation gone wrong. The tone of this story is set to be one irony. The story is filled with grotesque but meaningful irony. I this analysis I will guide you through the clues provided by the author, which in the end climax to the following lesson: “A Good Man” is not shown good by outward appearance, language, thinking, but by a life full of “good” actions.
26Carter W. Martin, The True Country: Themes in the Fiction of Flannery O'Connor, p. 105.
Whitt, Margaret. Understanding Flannery O’Connor. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995. 47-48, 78. Print.
Web. . Margaret, Whitt. Understanding Flannery O’Connor . Ebook.