A Good Man is Hard to Find

Introduction

A Good Man Is Hard to find, by Mary Flannery O'Connor who is a devoted Roman not only to the family but also to the church. Brought up in Georgia's Southern Region attending mass often as a child while growing up in the Southern region.

The author acquired a degree of M. F.A and soon returned back to her home town due to her father's illness, which eventually led, to father's death. Mary never left the home town long enough that she could forget that what she was and how she made herself. The history of Mary and her religious philosophy that eventually fashioned her narrative putting light on the family values she adopted. The character she depicts states how one can eventually end the moral corruption in catastrophic. If there is no change in one's life, and one is unable to seek the right way of living then it can be said that dishonesty, carelessness and disobedience is made to cross the path with death.

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

"A Good Man Is Hard to Find", which became the title story of her first collection of short fiction, remains one of her most difficult, if her most popular, short story. It centers on Bailey's mother and a criminal called The Misfit (which she based on a real person and incident). At the start, Bailey's mother, the grandmother of the story, exactingly described as sneaky, and she is proud. Following a brief nap, she awakes to recall a plantation house she once visited, a house which her own son has, pointedly, never provided her and his family. She forces this loss by seducing the children to insist on visiting the ruins: she tells it has a secret panel and some lost silver. Their curiosity and the family's greed thus provoke the fatal error of going there: her own selfish desire corrupts them.

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.

The author here focuses on the readers to make them feel responsible for their actions and ...