A Good Man Is Hard To Find

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“A Good Man Is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor is a fictional short story that begins as a cynical tale and turns into a tale about redemption. The story portrays an ordinary family from Atlanta who take an absurd family trip that turns into into a violent encounter with the insane escaped convict named the Misfit. The grandmothers actions through out the story are what creates the overall theme Flannery O’Connor author of A Good Man Is Hard to Find, uses characterization, the exposition of the story, and religion to help the reader better understand the final quote from the Misfit and how he was correct in his assessment that if the grandmother would have lived her life on the verge of death, so to speak, she could have gained the compassion …show more content…
For example, in the text the narrator says, that the grandmother is careful to wear her best clothes when traveling so that that “in case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady” (O’Connor 679). This shows us that the grandmother thinks of herself as a "lady," but places more importance on looking like one than acting like one. We see that she is obsessed with everything worldly and superficial and her primary concern is respectability, believing that by projecting herself as a lady, she will also appear as good and worthy of the respect of others. The grandmother also constantly criticizes others as the source of problems and insists that she is right. By the grandmothers conversation with Red Sam about how “people are certainly not nice like they used to be,” we see that she works hard to display her apparent goodness but also has a distorted perception of what a “good person” is. Essentially, she likes the idea of being a “good person”, but only when her peers are watching. The grandmother might never have realized the hypocrisy of her ways if she wasn’t faced with death, but because she did face death she learned the difference between what she wants to believe and the reality of things. With the grandmother telling the
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