Good Man Brown

In “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, you are surprised with the extreme violence at the end of the story. But, if you read the story a second time, you can see the definite signs of foreshadowing that hints the ending of the story. Through O’Connor’s technique of strong imagery to foreshadow the people and the events in the story is very compelling. There are two significant times that the author uses this technique. They are the description of the grandmother’s dress and the graveyard.

The story begins with a family trying to decide where to go on vacation. The family’s grandmother is the only one not wanting to go to Florida . She would rather go to Tennessee where she has some friends to see. She ironically dresses in her Sunday best. She is dressed very nicely with, “A navy blue dress with a small white dot in the print. Her collars and cuffs were white organdy trimmed with lace and at her neckline she had pinned a purple spray of cloth violets containing a sachet.” A strong foreshadowing imagery can be seen in this line. Knowing the ending of the story, the grandmother’s elaborate dress symbolizes a preparation for her funeral. When a person die, he or she usually are dressed in their best outfit, just like the grandmother is dressed in what seems to be her Sunday best.

Secondly, the foreshadowing of the family’s death is the graveyard when they “passed by a cotton field with five or six graves fenced”. There is a direct relation that the numbers of graves “five or six” matches the exact number of people in the car.. There are six people, including the baby, although, the baby might be considered as a half, or part of the mother, and not counted as a full person. So, it is appropriate to say that the number of graves is five or six.