A Good Man Is Hard to Find, and Other Stories by Flannery O'Connor

First published: 1955

Type of work: Short fiction

The Work

A Georgia native and devout Roman Catholic, Flannery O’Connor was first viewed somewhat narrowly as an important regional writer identified with the Southern gothic style. However, she is increasingly seen by twenty-first century critics as one of the most significant American fiction writers of the last century and a master of short fiction. Her writing is distinguished by a striking mix of humor, violence, and religious themes. The humor often results from the unexpected context of the violence, the violence shocks the characters into self-awareness, and the religious themes center on the grace offered through self-awareness. O’Connor’s stories often end with either the death or the humiliation of her protagonists, so it may seem ironic that her theme is one of optimism and hope. For O’Connor, however, the highest value is the acceptance of grace, and her characters often do not recognize grace, much less feel the need of it, until their lives are threatened.

The collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find, and Other Stories contains ten stories, three of which—“Good Country People,” “The Displaced Person,” and “A Good Man Is Hard To Find”—are often anthologized and are among O’Connor’s best.

“Good Country People” is typical of O’Connor’s fiction in several ways. All the characters are flawed and generally unappealing. Mrs. Hopewell speaks in clichés and, as her name implies, maintains a shallowly optimistic view of life, believing that the innocence and simplicity of good country people is the height of virtue. Her daughter stands in sharp contrast. Joy—or, as she prefers to be called, Hulga—is cynical and condescending and believes that her atheism is proof of her intellectual superiority. She is, in addition, one of O’Connor’s grotesques, having lost her leg in a shooting accident as a child.

The change agents in O’Connor’s fiction often appear from nowhere, have evil motivations, and disappear as quickly as they appeared. This story is no different. Manly Pointer is a traveling Bible salesman whom Mrs. Hopewell lauds as the epitome of country virtue and whom Joy/Hulga decides to seduce to prove her mother wrong. However, when Pointer turns the tables by seducing Joy/Hulga instead and stealing her wooden leg, Hulga is humiliated. Her assumed superiority is shattered when Pointer laughs at her atheism, telling her he has believed in nothing all his life. Such self-knowledge is a prerequisite to grace in O’Connor’s fiction and, as here, often occurs at the climactic ending. What use the character makes of it is often ambiguous. In “Good Country People,” Hulga is left in the hay loft in a pool of light. All that is certain is that her self-image has been seriously altered.

“The Displaced Person” is O’Connor’s longest short story and one of her most complex. A priest brings the Polish Mr. Guizac and his family, displaced by World War II, to Mrs. McIntyre’s farm, where Guizac becomes the best farmhand she has ever hired. In fact, Mrs. McIntyre claims that Mr. Guizac is her salvation. However, this displaced person’s prowess upsets the comfortable order of the farm. The surreptitious moonshine operation of the dairy man, Mr. Shortley, and the occasional thefts of the African American hands, Sulk and Astor, are no longer the order of the day. However, Mr. Guizac’s plan to bring his white sixteen-year-old niece to America to marry the African American Sulk is a disruption that even Mrs. McIntyre cannot tolerate.

The turning point of the story occurs as Mr. Guizac lies on the ground repairing a tractor. Mr. Shortley has parked a larger tractor nearby and stepped away. The brake on the larger tractor accidentally slips, and it rolls toward Mr. Guizac. Mrs. McIntyre, Sulk, and Mr. Shortley glance at one another and, without a word, allow the tractor to roll over Mr. Guizac, breaking his back. Mr. Guizac’s death eliminates the social upheaval his arrival caused, but the others’ complicity in his death destroys any hope of returning to the status quo. They realize they have allowed a man to die rather than lose their social positions and way of life. Both Sulk and Mr. Shortley soon abandon the farm, and Mrs. McIntyre suffers a nervous breakdown. Only the priest maintains his role, continuing to visit the declining Mrs. McIntyre and enjoying the peacocks who surround the farm.

The peacock is a common motif in O’Connor’s fiction, a symbol of God’s immanence. The bird appears repeatedly here, but only the priest appreciates its beauty, associating it with Christ. Mr. Guizac is another Christ figure. Mrs. McIntyre even tells the priest that, as far as she is concerned, Jesus was a displaced person. By use of these motifs, O’Connor contrasts the gentleness and the potential disruption that Christ’s presence can bring. Mrs. McIntyre and her workers are blind to the presence of gentle grace, and, when their pride and idolatry are exposed, they destroy the change agent rather than change their own ways.

The title story of the collection, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” is O’Connor’s most famous. In it, a grandmother, her son Bailey, and his family plan a short vacation to Florida. The unnamed grandmother would rather go to Tennessee. She uses news of the Florida escape of a notorious killer, the Misfit, to try to get her way but fails. The grandmother’s attempt to manipulate her son, her insistence on dressing well so that people will know she is a lady, and her superficial interactions with her grandchildren are quite funny, but also reveal the woman’s pride, pettiness, and self-centeredness.

The family stops along the way for barbeque, and the grandmother and the restaurant proprietor sanctimoniously agree on the difficulty of finding a truly good person. The family continues its journey, but near Toombsboro, Georgia, the grandmother upsets the cat, which escapes from its box and startles Bailey, causing an accident. As the family scrambles from the car wreck, a hearse-like automobile approaches along the deserted road, and three men get out. The grandmother, recognizing one of them from the news article, immediately blurts out that he is the Misfit. Thus exposed, the Misfit calmly directs the other men to take various members of the family into the woods and shoot them.

While this is happening, the grandmother tries to convince the Misfit that he is, after all, a good man, that he would not shoot a lady, and that he should pray to Jesus. The Misfit responds that Jesus set everything off balance by raising the dead. In a moment of clarity, the grandmother sees the suffering beneath the violence of this man and for the first time recognizing their common humanity, impulsively reaches out to him, calling him one of her children. He recoils and shoots her. The story ends with his observation that the grandmother would only have been good if there had been someone there to shoot her every moment of her life and his admonishment to a henchman that there is no pleasure in life.

This story is quintessential O’Connor and one reason she has been called one of the funniest and most frightening authors of American short fiction. Perhaps no other story better illustrates the ruthlessness with which she treats her characters. The grandmother and the Misfit would seem to be polar opposites, yet O’Connor scrutinizes and exposes them equally. The criminal is a brutal killer, but he has thought deeply about Christianity. He understands that the truth or falsehood of Christ’s resurrection of Lazarus has grave consequences. On the other hand, the grandmother, who closely identifies herself as a Christian, fails repeatedly to display the most nominal Christian virtues. The Misfit and the grandmother are alike in their moral bankruptcy.

Such total depravity is essential, for the brand of grace offered in O’Connor’s stories is completely undeserved. A good man (or woman) truly is hard to find. The grandmother identifies with the Misfit, because in that brief moment of revelation—again, so characteristic in O’Connor—she finally understands her own deficiency and accepts the offered grace. Her death, then, is not a tragic ending, but a spiritual beginning. The fate of the Misfit is much more ambiguous. The grandmother’s gesture of kinship is an offering, but his final line, that there’s no pleasure in life, leaves his response unclear.

Bibliography

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