What is the book A River Runs Through It About? is a river runs through it a true story.
Contents
“A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is a typical Flannery O’Connor story, which means it presents us with a strange morality — one where integrity is found in immoral people and where hypocrisy and moral corruption seem magnetically attached to outwardly “good” people.
The main themes in “A Good Man is Hard to Find” are finding grace, prejudice, and family. Finding Grace: Extraordinary circumstances allow a selfish character like the grandmother to truly understand the meaning of grace.
- “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”
- “The River”
- “The Life You Save May Be Your Own”
- “A Stroke of Good Fortune”
- “A Temple of the Holy Ghost”
- “The Artificial Nigger”
- “A Circle in the Fire”
- “A Late Encounter with the Enemy”
The Misfit remains largely a mystery throughout the story. The Grandmother first reads about him in the newspaper—he is an escaped convict and murderer, and is thought to be headed to Florida (like the family).
Near the end of the story, the Misfit tells the grandmother that he calls himself the Misfit “because [he] can’t make what all [he] done wrong fit what all [he] gone through in punishment.” In other words, his punishment has not fit his so-called crime; it is, in a very literal way, a mis-fit.
Situational irony occurs when a development in a story is the opposite of what the reader expects. In “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” this type of irony occurs when an evil man, The Misfit, causes Bailey’s mother to see herself for what she is, a sinner.
You’re one of my own children!” The Misfit isn’t literally the grandmother’s child; rather, this points to the fact that she realizes they are both human beings. Her comment seems inappropriate—even insane—given the circumstances, but this is actually the grandmother’s most lucid moment in the story.
Because the Misfit has questioned himself and his life so closely, he reveals a self-awareness that the grandmother lacks. He knows he isn’t a great man, but he also knows that there are others worse than him. He forms rudimentary philosophies, such as “no pleasure but meanness” and “the crime don’t matter.”
The “mother” in the story is unnamed, a non-entity as you put it, because her identity is unimportant. Like the grandmother, who is likewise unnamed, the mother is a representation of her generation. When the grandmother objects to the family’s choice to go to Florida on vacation, the narrator says: …
The Misfit is the main antagonist of the short story “A Good Man is Far to Find” by Flannery ‘O Connor.
The Misfit kills the grandmother last to make her death more painful (at least to the reader). The grandmother has to endure listening to the other five members of her family get shot in closer range (even though, in her selfish attitude, she doesn’t seem to care much).
“A good man is hard to find,” Red Sammy said. “Everything is getting terrible. I remember the day you could go off and leave your screen door unlatched. Not no more.”
It is clear and definite that the Misfit lacks empathy, a psychopath, and is not one of those murderers that does it for fun and so see their victim in pain, a sadist. Towards the end of the short story, the Misfit is expresses how he kills people for the meanness of doing it (O ‘Connor 308).
The protagonist of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is the unnamed grandmother. The grandmother undergoes a significant transformation over the course of the story, transitioning from a self-absorbed, proud woman to one who can extend love and acceptance to the Misfit at the end.
In the religious drama within the story, the Misfit acts as both Christ and anti-Christ figure. He compares himself to Christ, saying, “It was the same case with Him as me, except He hadn’t committed any crime and they could prove I had committed one because they had the papers on me” (131).