A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor
"A Good Man Is Hard to Find" is a short story by American author Flannery O'Connor, known for its exploration of complex themes such as identity, morality, and the nature of good and evil. The narrative centers around a character known only as the grandmother, who embodies a flawed sense of self-importance and a misguided belief in her ability to judge human nature. As her family embarks on a vacation to Florida, the grandmother expresses her fears about an escaped convict called the Misfit, reflecting her preoccupation with social class and her own status as a "lady." The story employs irony to reveal the grandmother's superficiality and the emptiness of her values, particularly in the face of life-and-death situations.
The plot's climax occurs when the family encounters the Misfit, who embodies the very threat that the grandmother has feared. Through this encounter, O'Connor critiques the grandmother's delusions of gentility and her misguided assumptions about morality. The story culminates in a tragic ending that underscores the themes of sin and the often harsh realities of human existence. O'Connor's work invites readers to reflect on the contradictions within personal identity and societal expectations, making it a significant piece in the realm of Southern Gothic literature.
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A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor
First published: 1953 (collected in A Good Man Is Hard to Find, 1955)
The Work
“A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” the title story of Flannery O’Connor’s first collection of short stories, is one of her most anthologized stories. As in most of her stories, the theme of identity in this story involves O’Connor’s Christian conviction about the role of sin, particularly the sin of pride, in distorting one’s true identity. The focal character in the story, who is identified only as the grandmother, convinces herself and, she thinks, her family, that she is a good judge of human nature.
In fact, she assumes that she is the best judge on any matter. The story opens with her son, Bailey, planning a family vacation to Florida. The grandmother opposes the idea, because an escaped killer known in the papers as the Misfit is supposedly headed toward Florida. She has very clear ideas of the flaws in character and the influence of class that go to making a criminal such as the Misfit. The grandmother’s false sense of self-importance, which she sees as separating herself from vulgarity, which is represented by the Misfit, is a motif typical of O’Connor’s fiction, and the plot hinges on the revelation of the falseness of the grandmother’s self-image.
From the beginning, O’Connor is careful to distance the narration from the grandmother’s delusions, with judicious use of irony. After describing the physical details of the grandmother’s extravagant traveling clothes, the narration offers a reflection that is apparently intended to represent the grandmother’s thoughts: “In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady.” Being “a lady” is an important part of the grandmother’s self-identity, yet it is defined externally, by clothing, and seems dependent on other people’s opinions. A further irony is that the grandmother is reflecting on her appearance and class in death, a time when neither matters much. The same irony reappears a few pages later when the grandmother tells her grandchildren, John Wesley and June Star, that she would have done well to marry a certain Mr. Teagarden because he was “a gentleman” and had died a very wealthy man. Again the insistence on wealth and status appears in the context of death, which renders them meaningless.
The grandmother’s own death at the end of the story provides the final irony. After lamenting with a restaurant owner on the decline of gentility—the scarcity of “good men” suggested by the title—the family encounters the only character in the story with the sort of manners and external refinement that the grandmother values, and he turns out to be the Misfit. She can tell by looking at him, the grandmother tells the Misfit, that he has no “common blood” in him, and the Misfit agrees. Then he and his henchmen shoot the entire family dead.
Bibliography
Asals, Frederick. Flannery O’Connor: The Imagination of Extremity. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982.
Bloom, Harold. Flannery O’Connor. New York: Chelsea House, 1986.
Cash, Jean W. Flannery O'Connor: A Life. University of Tennessee, 2002.
Cheatham, George. “Jesus, O’Connor’s Artificial Nigger.” Studies in Short Fiction 22, no. 4 (Fall, 1985): 475-479. Offers a brief discussion of the symbolism of the statue in “The Artificial Nigger.”
Cheney, Brainard. “Flannery O’Connor’s Campaign for Her Country.” Sewanee Review 72 (Autumn, 1964): 555-558. Cheney’s obituary for O’Connor describes her vocation as a Christian writer.
Getz, Lorine M. Nature and Grace in Flannery O’Connor’s Fiction. New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1982. Getz attempts to analyze the various actions of grace in O’Connor’s work and the literary devices used to convey them.
Grimshaw, James A., Jr. The Flannery O’Connor Companion. Westport, Conn. Greenwood Press, 1981. An introduction to O’Connor’s writings, both fiction and nonfiction. Features an introductory overview, a chronological survey of O’Connor’s work, a catalog of her fictional characters, illustrations, and two appendices.
Shloss, Carol. Flannery O’Connor’s Dark Comedies: The Limits of Inference. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980.
Zoller, Peter T. “The Irony of Preserving the Self: Flannery O’Connor’s ‘A Stroke of Good Fortune.’” Kansas Quarterly 9, no. 2 (Spring, 1977): 61-66. Zoller reads “A Stroke of Good Fortune” as a religious parable on the foibles of human pride. Calls the story “the Divine Comedy in modern dress.”