“A Good Man Is Hard
to Find”
A story is
made up of many elements. A short story with many elements can be used to
employ an interesting piece of literary work. Flannery O’Connor’s cynical tale,
“A Good Man Is Hard to Find” uses the elements of characterization, symbolism,
and theme to make an account that has many confused about whether the story is
a horror story, a black comedy, or a depiction of God’s works through humans. “Maybe
it's even all of these at once” (Shmoop). The story presents the debate that
good versus evil is more than a typical war story. When one examines humans, it
is seen that inevitably all good is tainted with bad and every bad is threaded
with some good.
The characterization
in a story supports the theme by showing realistic humans in extreme
situations. “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” demonstrates the point by showing the
grandmother as representing a majority of the good that’s in the world and The
Misfit as an example of the evil in the world in the situation of facing a
murderer. The mother and children embody the innocent in the world who are subjected
to the wrong doings of evil. The family have to deal with a situation that was
only skewed and dangerous because of the grandmother’s, the “good” person,
interference with the plans.
The grandmother’s goodness is
implied as she insinuates herself as a “lady” (O’Conner 421). She is seen
pleading for the sake of the children in the beginning of the story, pleading
for the sake of their safety (420). In addition, the grandmother shows that on
this earth, nobody is perfect. Everybody has a humanistic downfall that brings
them closer to the side of evil. This is portrayed in the judgmental character
of the grandmother. She judges the mother of the children by criticizing her
parenting skills and then compares her face to a cabbage (420). Inside the car,
she rebukes John Wesley for his lack of pride and respect towards Georgia
saying that a little boy should have a higher opinion toward his native state (422).
She starts to judgmentally talk about her views on current state of the world
and how people have all turned into untrustworthy and appalling people (424).
The grandmother is a static
character. “‘Maybe He didn’t raise the dead’” (432) wasn’t an epiphany for her
or a change in faith because it goes on to explain that she didn’t know what
she was saying and “she sank down in the ditch with her legs twisted under her”
(432). She was a judgmental old lady who stayed that way. In the end of the
story, she hadn’t really changed, she was crumpling under pressure. The
grandmother was doing what she could to convince The Misfit not to shoot her.
In her last act of crying out, “‘Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my
own children!’” (433) and by touching his shoulder, she was seeking to lessen
her blow. She had tried this method of handling situations before when the car
crashed; she hoped she was badly injured so “Bailey’s wrath wouldn’t come down
on her all at once” (426), and then she cried out, “I believe I have injured an
organ” (427) but to no effect. The grandmother, although shown to be more
virtuous than some of the other characters, is a static character who tries to
manipulate people from the beginning of the story up until her last words.
The Misfit,
on the other hand, shows his wickedness through his actions and then what he
thinks about them. He claims “‘…the crime don’t matter’” (431) and he says that
the criminal will forget what they did and receive unfair punishment anyway. He
also states that there is “no pleasure but meanness” (432). The Misfit is a
static character who starts as a murderer and ends by killing a whole family. The
Misfit cannot understand what good is. He thinks that Jesus threw the world off
balance because of what he did (432). He does terrible things the way most
people do normal things: relaxed. The Misfit represents the evil in the world, but
as ruthless and calloused as he is, he isn’t always uncivilized or hasty. The
grandmother recognized The Misfit as the escaped prisoner she read about and
The Misfit didn’t react swiftly to silence her. Instead, he comforts her (after
her son makes a shocking remark) by saying, “‘Lady,’ he said, ‘don’t you get
upset. Sometimes a man says things he don’t mean. I don’t reckon he meant to
talk to you thataway’” (428). He respects ladies; even if it only is by apologizing for his naked
chest or speaking politely to them, The Misfit shows that he isn’t a savage
beast (430).
The
grandmother’s daughter-in-law and her three kids are primarily viewed as
innocent characters who don’t provide much opposition to good, or resistance to
evil, in the story. Though everyone has bits of good and evil in them, these
characters’ actions are so few that it’s hard to analyze. There is little
insight into how the characters deal with The Misfit when confronted with mortal
danger. Even when knowing that they are going off to die where Bailey died, the
point of view doesn’t reveal any sort of emotion or thought from the family
members (431). It is difficult to tag any of them as either mainly good or
mainly wicked because their actions never pushed them too far one way or the
other. The mother and her children represent the people in the world who walk
by; they are not closely observed and go by unnoticed the majority of the time.
Their motives are never analyzed within the story so judgment is difficult to
make.
The symbolism
throughout the story shows the mix of good and evil and foreshadows the events
to come. The grandmother’s hat (421), for instance, symbolizes a moral code. The
moral code that the grandmother has made up for herself is that she is a lady
who will always let it be known. She made her dress and hat look perfect in
case of an accident where she ended up dead on the highway; people would know
that she was a lady (421). She didn’t seem to care that in this scenario she
was dead; she just found that presenting herself as a lady was an important thing.
Ladies are generally good-natured and respected so the grandmother’s want to be
perceived like that is a respectable thing. However, being unconcerned about
her family’s, and her own, safety is distinguished as an immoral thought.
While the grandmother’s hat
symbolizes something good natured and respected, there are many items that
symbolize and foreshadow terrible events. While driving to their destination in
Florida, the family passes through a town. As soon as they exit the town of
Toombsboro, the grandmother wakes up and remembers a house she once visited.
Toombsboro is brought up right before the family is introduced to the character
of The Misfit (425). The name indicates the word “tomb”. This name foreshadows
the event that leads the family to their grave.
The woods are hugely symbolic. The
woods are described as “tall and dark and deep” (427). The woods symbolize the
Grim Reaper, the personification of death. “The most common embodiment of the
Grim Reaper is a tall, dark figure, clad in the black robes of a monk” (Paranda).
“Alone with The Misfit, the
grandmother found that she had lost her voice. There was not a cloud in the sky
nor any sun. There was nothing around her but woods” (O’Connor 432). This
passage foreshadows the intimate and unescapable demise of the grandmother
because it describes her setting as solitarily death surrounding her. These are
the woods that five members of the family go off and are murdered, confirmed
when The Misfit, after shooting the grandmother in the chest, tells Hiram and
Bobby Lee, “‘Take her off and throw her where you thown the others’” (O’Connor 433).
The theme, “the
unifying generalization about life stated or implied by the story” (Arp and
Johnson 191) is that there is no purely righteous person in the world, nor is
there a wholly wicked person. We come to see through “A Good Man Is Hard to
Find” that though many try to be perfectly good, human’s idiosyncrasies bring
mistakes. The grandmother is judgmental, although she tries to appear virtuous
by her clothing and posture (O’Connor 421). People who are devilish in their
actions can have good qualities. The Misfit kills people with seemingly no
second thought, but he takes the time to have a conversation and treat the
grandmother as a colloquial equal (428).
Through the
characters in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” show that no person can be simply
black or white. By analyzing the characterization, symbolism, and the main
theme, O’Connor reveals that there are shades to every human that can be seen
through their motives.
Works Cited
Arp, Thomas, and Greg Johnson. Perrine’s Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense. Tenth Ed.
Ed. Thomas Arp and Greg Johnson. Boston:
Wadsworth, Cengage Learning, 2009. Print.
O’Connor, Flannery. “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” Perrine’s Literature: Structure, Sound, and
Sense. Tenth Ed. Ed. Thomas Arp
and Greg Johnson. Boston: Wadsworth, Cengage
Learning, 2009.
420. Print.
Paranda. “Grim Reaper.” Everything2.com. Everything2 Media, LLC.
Web. 14 Nov. 2013.
Shmoop Editorial Team. “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” Shmoop.com.
Shmoop University, Inc.,
11 Nov.
2008. Web. 11 Nov. 2013.
