“A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O'Connor

Introduction

“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 (Cheney, 55).

Discussion

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 (Cheatham, 75).

Form and Content

Five of the stories include strong Southern women whose “sins” range from simple smugness to pride in one's physical and material attributes as virtues. In “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” a meddlesome but good-hearted grandmother inadvertently leads her entire family to their violent deaths at the hands of a criminal known as the Misfit (Zoller, 61).

After the rest of the family has been killed, the grandmother experiences a profound spiritual change while talking to the Misfit as she accepts her connection to all living things. The Misfit acknowledges that she would have been a good woman if there had been “somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” (Cheney, 56) In “A Stroke of Good Fortune,” Ruby Hill is a plump, judgmental woman returning from a visit to Madam Zoleeda, a fortune teller who informed Ruby that she is on the brink of a long illness followed by good fortune. The story ends with a stunned Ruby accepting the fact that she is pregnant, a condition she has carefully avoided and finds disgusting in others. In “A Circle in the Fire,” Mrs. Cope is the proud owner of the best-kept farm in the county, but her worst fears come true when three boys, envious of her possessions, set fire to her farm. She watches, stunned, as a column of smoke rises over her woods, and she listens to their “shrieks of joy as if the prophets were dancing in the fiery furnace, in the circle the angel had cleared for them.” (Cheatham, 76)

Themes and Meanings

This intensely ironic story investigates with horrifying effect what happens when one of the worst anxieties of modern life, the threat of sudden violence at the hands of an unknown ...