A Good Man Is Hard To Find Character Analysis

Words: 1274
Pages: 6

Pope Francis said, “Each of us has a vision of good and of evil. We have to encourage people to move towards what they think is good” and in both short stories “Young Goodman Brown” and “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, characters are guided through a journey of good and evil. In Nathaniel Hawthorn’s “Young Goodman Brown”, Goodman Brown transitions through “good” and “evil’ while being guided along by The Fellow Traveler, similarly in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” the grandmother is guided through her transition with help from The Misfit. Both “Young Goodman Brown” and “A Good Man is Hard to Find” follow the theme of very strong false appearances, and people putting up façades in order to appear “good” and shelter their reputations from “evil”. In both works, the characters experience a struggle through “good” and “evil”, however the way they are guided through that journey and their view of the world and people …show more content…
Despite “Young Goodman Brown” being based in the Puritan town of Salem during 1692, the time of the Salem witch trials where people were prosecuted for assumption of witchcraft, it is capable of being compared to Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, a story based in the South during the 1940s with a Catholic background. Both writers wrote with the purpose to show how the evil aspects of society and people’s personalities impact how they view others, and interact with them, however in “A Good Man is Hard to Find” The Misfit struggles with his past and how to cope with the unjust punishments he was given, while in “Young Goodman Brown” after Goodman Brown’s encounter in the forest he realizes his own sin (“evil”) and also the evil of society members who he had, until then, held in high