“A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Conner is just one of her many short stories she published in her lifetime. The short story has elements of religious overtones, comedy, death, and a warped definition of a “good man.” The religious overtones were mostly influenced by O’Conner’s own experience with Religion, being a devout Catholic herself, and her passion to prove the truth of Faith through her literary writing. I automatically disliked the grandma in the story because she cared more about looking and dressing like a Christian than actually acting like one. She acts like she is more moral or holly than the other family members even though she is the one who deceives the family by lying to the kids about a “secret panel,” making the family take a detour in their vacation that resulted in disaster. The combination of a comedic bickering of a family on vacation mixed with undertones of death and the unexpected killing of every character in the end of the story made gave me a rollercoaster experience when I read it for the first time. It is almost sick and twisted in way, and I especially experienced this when I read: “We’ve had an ACCIDENT!” the children screamed in a frenzy of delight. “But nobody’s killed,” June Star said with disappointment as the grandmother limped out of the car.” (1053) My favorite part of undertone that I recognized right away was the fact that they were all getting ready to get in the car and the grandmother was taking so much time preparing her outfit incase of an accident, “anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady” was a big red flag to me that the family was going to have a turn for the worst. The biggest moral question in this story that I discovered was if the grandmother actually underwent a miraculous change of heart by reacting out to her killer with motherly love or if she was just saying what she thought would most likely keep her from dying. The most important quote that I took from the story was at the end, when everyone is dead and the Misfit is talking to his friend about the grandmother, he says, “She would have been a good woman if he had been there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
Whether or not the grandmother was a fraud or someone who actually was a good christian is the main question from the story. When I blogged about this story I couldn't decide which category to put her in. Because O'Conner was such a religious person I think she put this ending in the story to allow other christians reading it to assess themselves and decide what kind of a person they would have been in that situation.
ReplyDeleteI think that in the ending quote, "She would have been a good woman if he had been there to shoot her every minute of her life," it brings out the irony of the situation. The man who kills her realizes that when when she is walking the line between death and life she suddenly has a true realization of faith; she's no longer pretending but truly has a christian outlook, though it's only when she is about to die. Therefore if someone were to be pointing a gun at her face all the time she may actually pay attention to her faith.
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