A Good Man Is Hard To Find

Introduction

A Georgia native and devout Roman Catholic, Flannery O'Connor first viewed somewhat narrowly as an important regional writer identified with the Southern gothic style. However, she 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 distinguished by a striking mix of humor, violence, and religious themes. The humor often results from the unexpected context of violence, the violence shocks the characters into self-awareness, and the theological themes center on the grace offered through self-awareness (Whitt, pp. 132). 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 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”, often anthologized and are among O'Connor's best.

Discussion

Flannery O'Connor claimed always to center her fiction on the extraordinary moments of God's grace, when it touches even the most maimed, deformed, or unregenerate of people; especially those; proper Christian literature, she remarked, is always "an invitation to deeper and stranger visions" (Eder, pp. 24). Yet; however, willingly the most faithful reader might listen to such remarks, precisely those extraordinary moments when God's grace meant to enter the lives of her characters have been the most troubling, even for such an admirer as Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk for whom she sustained the highest respect. Speaking once of another of her stories, "The Lame Shall Enter First", he notes that her compelling characters are bad, and her dishonest people finally not so bad as they first seem, while her crazy people turn out to have a kind of sanity.

There are reasons for this difficulty. Throughout O'Connor's short stories and novels, God seems to spend his grace on the unlikeliest of people. Usually they do not appear to deserve his blessing; almost as often they appear to learn nothing from it. Nor is grace dramatized as a dazzling joy, a sweep of awareness. Rather, it can come in an act of random violence, a forceful accident, a blinding pain. It can be unexpected, intrusive, unwanted, ignored, baffling, misidentified, forgotten. It can bring suffering, wretchedness, even annihilation. Walter Sullivan has counted its cost. In the 19 stories published in her lifetime, he notes, nine end in one or more violent deaths, three others end in physical assaults and bodily injury and, in the remaining seven, one ends in arson, another two theft (Bloom, pp. 57). This problem has left her apologist Frederick Asals to note that her fiction meant to catch the reader unawares by being anthropotropic rather than theotropic, concentrating more on people than on God despite ...