A Good Man Is Hard To Find And Its Influences

"A Good Man Is Hard to Find" and its Influences

Mary Flannery O'Connor is one of the most regarded southern writers of all time. In her short 39 years, she accomplished more than most writers achieve in a lifetime. Her two novels and numerous short stories are widely read today, fifty years after she wrote them. One of her most praised short stories is "A Good Man Is Hard to Find."

Flannery O'Connor was born in the small southern town of Savannah, Georgia. She was the only child of a wealthy Catholic family. At the age of 12, her family moved to Milledgeville, Georgia. She was highly educated, getting her Bachelors of Arts from Georgia State College for Women and her Masters of Fine Arts in Literature from the University of Iowa. She published her first story in 1946 at the age of twenty-one. Although she only lived 39 years, Flannery O'Connor left her mark on literature.

"A Good Man Is Hard to Find" is the story of a family vacation turned deadly. In the first half of the story, the family including the grandmother, son, wife and grandchildren embark on their annual family vacation. The family is not a close, likeable family. The grandmother is self-centered and makes an effort to take control of the vacation. She claims that she does not want to go to Florida, their scheduled destination. She would rather visit east Tennessee. The grandmother attempts to manipulate her son to change their travel plans. She tells him of an escaped convict who is reportedly fleeing to Florida. She further states that the parents "ought to take them [the children] somewhere else for a change so they would see different parts of the world and be broad." The grandmother is a manipulative woman who exploits the people in her life to get what she desires.

Flannery O'Connor was a known devout Catholic. Her stories are strongly influenced by her religious beliefs. In "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," O'Connor tells a violent story of grace. In this story, grace is defined as the love and acceptance from God to ordinary people. O'Connor was concerned with the faith of society, especially the protestant south. Believing that distress or fright was the most effective technique to reach society, she uses tragedy as a method of shocking the reader into understanding her personal religious beliefs. According to Harold Bloom, "her incessant violence...is troublesome but...her passionate endorsement of that violence as [is] the only way to startle her secular readers into a spiritual awareness" (3).

In this story, O'Connor conveys the message of mercy most appropriately through the grandmother's conversations with the Misfit. The grandmother's actions prior to meeting the Misfit prove that she is lacking faith. Once she comes into contact with him, she informs him that he needs to pray. Taking the grandmother's personality and actions into consideration, the grandmother is advising of a ritual that she rarely commits herself. She is much too self-centered to accept God. Further, after the deaths of her loved ones, the grandmother continues to be of concern for herself. She does not show grief at the loss of her family instead she pleads for her own life. At the point when she finally reaches out to another human being, the Misfit, and shows compassion for him, he shoots her. He claims that "'she would of been a good women, 'if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.'" In this line, O'Connor is notifying the reader that the grandmother would have been a good women if she would have been compassionate for people and accepted God before her impending death. I believe Flannery O'Connor employs this brutal method to establish a sense of urgency in her message. She desires that her readers understand the importance of salvation and that that anyone can have it if only they ask.

Flannery O'Connor wrote "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" in the early 1950s, during which the south was unstable.