“A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor Analysis
Genre: A classic example of Southern Gothic literature, exploring the dark, grotesque side of genteel Southern life.
The Core Conflict: The Grandmother’s obsession with “good blood” and social appearances vs. The Misfit’s existential crisis.
The Deeper Meaning: Flannery O’Connor uses the shock of violence not just for horror, but as a theological tool to force her characters (and readers) to confront the reality of Grace and Redemption. She was a devout Catholic and her stories contain religious and theological themes.
The Conclusion: The story argues that pain is often the only thing loud enough to wake a soul to God, transforming a tragic car crash into a moment of spiritual opportunity.
I have always believed that the best stories are the ones that challenge us to look at the harder parts of life. As a teacher and a lover of Southern Gothic literature, Flannery O’Connor has a permanent place on my bookshelf. Her writing is precise, dark, and deeply spiritual.
I originally wrote this analysis for a class, but I am sharing it here because the questions it raises about grace, violence, and redemption are timeless. The story is so iconic, in fact, that it recently inspired Stephen King to write his own version called Slide Inn Road. Below is my take on the theological landscape of “A Good Man is Hard to Find”
Finding Grace in the Grotesque: An Analysis of “A Good Man is Hard to Find”
“A Good Man is Hard to Find” is a 1953 short story by Flannery O’Connor. It is one of her most famous stories, and was first included in her anthology A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories.
Like many stories in the collection, “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is primarily a religiously directed moral story, and can be read intentionally within the author’s stated goal of leading the reader to a deeper understanding of God. In particular, she wrote for her stories to be read within the prism of Roman Catholic theology. Every detail of her stories is deliberately picked to help the reader find moral meaning in life, and to spur them to a closer relationship and understanding of God’s grace, redemption, and the necessity of leading a holy life.
This purpose naturally falls within moralistic literacy theory. The genre of the story, like many others of her others, is Southern Gothic.
The Plot and The Journey
The story begins with a grandmother, her son, his wife, and their children packing on the eve of their trip to Florida. The grandmother does not wish to go to Florida, and instead wants to visit some of her family in Tennessee. To her consternation, the family does not listen to her even when she warns them that they might run into the serial killer called Misfit.
The next morning, the family gaily starts out, with the overdressed grandmother smuggling her cat in so she does not have to leave him behind. On the way, her two grandchildren bicker and fight, despite her admonishing them to respect their elders, just like children in her day and age did. It is implied that the grandmother is preoccupied with her idea of what proper people do and who is of good stock according to those measures.
The grandmother waxes lyrical about southern ideals and plantations and persuades her son to turn off and see a house she remembers seeing as a girl. As her son drives in vain down bumpy dirt roads, the grandmother is struck with horror when she remembers that the house she is talking about is in another state. In shock, she accidentally releases her cat, who startles her son and causes him to lose control of the car. The ensuing chaos brings about a crash, and their meeting with Misfit.
Misfit does indeed kill off the family in groups. As he murders the family, the grandmother and he discuss how he is really a good man, from a good family and how he should pray to Jesus. Misfit’s last action, just before he murders her, is to tell the grandmother that if he believed Jesus was resurrected, he would have been a better person. The story concludes with Misfit telling his murderous sidekicks that the grandmother could have been a good woman if she had someone to shoot her every minute of her life.
The Southern Gothic Style
Flannery O’Connor’s style of writing falls into the Southern Gothic genre in the style of literature. This is a unique style of writing that stems from the South’s particular history, tensions, and inhabitants. It is marked by irrational thoughts, impulses, dark humanity, and alienations within insolation from their surroundings. As it springs from an environment that must reconcile the impossible, genteel southern living ideals and slavery, and oppression, it is by nature dire, alienating, and bizarre.
In an essay Flannery O’Connor wrote about the grotesque in southern fiction (“Aspects Fiction” 36), she defines grotesque as something that is outside accepted norms and thus unknown and offensive. While the grandmother acts in an offensive way, she is meant simply as an inhabitant of the subset of Southern life. A life in which the inhabitants spent all their effort trying to define themselves as good, when, in fact, their unexamined lives made their actions the opposite of good. This sets the stage for the classic Southern Gothic story.
Religious Themes and Redemption
Anyone reading O’Connor will need to keep in mind her devout religious background. O’Connor was a strong Catholic who grew up in a sometimes-hostile Protestant south. Every aspect of her stories exists to create a reaction in the reader, to illustrate religious truth and religious journey. She believed that her job as a Southern gothic writer was to demand a redemptive act, to aim for restoration (“Nature Fiction” 63).
“A Good Man is Hard to Find” is written first as a description of a soul’s journey, and as an examination of the soul’s redemption. Every line is meant as a moral, and for that reason, can be read with the ideal of a moralistic literacy theory. The theory can be applied to match what the Catholic religion says about a soul’s particular judgement after death.
Particular judgement holds that all souls are immediately judged after death to either go to Heaven, Purgatory, or Hell.
- Heaven is for those who have lived that good moral life.
- Purgatory is for those who need further purification before they can enter in Heaven but are salvageable.
- Hell is for those beyond redemption.
Catholic theology states during all of life’s journey, humans are continually bombarded by the irresistible grace of God to bring them into alignment of his will for their life. All aspects of plot, character, character beliefs and symbolism bring the story to a conclusion of redemption opportunity. As this is a story of irresistible motion, germinated by the grandmother’s folly, an examination of character is a fitting way to investigate the moral that the writer is trying to convey.
Character Analysis: The Grandmother
There are three main groups of characters in the story; the grandmother, her family and Misfit. The story centers around the character of the grandmother, a symbol of southern life. She is the most fleshed out character in the story.
The grandmother has set her life definitions on defining who is a good man and who is not, while ignoring the obvious shortcomings and logical fallacies around her. If she succeeds in this task then she can stay in her defined world, and not examine the grotesque shape of her beliefs. In her mind, she organizes and shapes her beliefs in people to create an imaginary world that only she can live in. It does not and cannot exist in real life, because there is no such thing as the proper good South; the construct lives only in her mind.
In character she has devoted herself to being the essence of a good southern lady. The grandmother dresses in a fancy hat and dress and white gloves. She reminisces about her courtly southern beau, southern plantation and the polite past. On the surface she looks finished and polite, but in truth she is demanding, manipulating and nostalgic for a racist past. It is unquestionably true that she considers herself “good people.” In every detail O’Connor means to bring the grandmother kicking and screaming on a journey of her own. In every detail the grandmother is a fool, and O’Connor will have her journey on a Catholic journey of redemption. Though the grandmother has long ago set aside her Christian upbringing, she is exposed to the irresistible grace of God and given a chance at redemption.
Character Analysis: The Family
In comparison to the grandmother, the characters of the other members of the family are less filled out. Her grandchildren are disrespectful and unkind to each other, they talk back to the parents and sass the grandmother. They refuse to respect and act in a way that acknowledges the importance of the grandmother’s idealized South. Despite their immature flaws, they are innocent of the sins of the South; they do not know what a plantation is, they think it is abnormal that the naked boy does not have clothes and they do not respect their native Southern states.
Their father and mother also do not have developed characters. They mostly do not respond to what the grandmother says. The reader does not know what they think about the grandmother’s nostalgia for an idealized south. They are symbols of modern life, and preoccupied with comics, dancing and playing. Their speech and actions are common and unexamined. Although one of the children is named John Wesley, there is little indication that they are in any way religious. With her descriptions, O’Connor paints them as living in a day-to-day mundane pleasure, preoccupied with material items, ignoring the natural beauty around them. While it as not as fleshed out, they also are on a journey towards their own death, and they also at the last minute find a sort of redemption.
Character Analysis: Misfit
Besides the grandmother, the improbable character of Misfit is the other most defined character. He and his henchmen, once identified by the grandmother, coldly decide to kill the family, so they can hide their tracks, change their clothes, and switch cars.
He is an ex-convict, who has done a little bit of everything in life. Though it is not defined, it seems like he has killed his father. Misfit tells the grandmother that he agrees that he is good folk, and his mother and father were good stock. He adds details to make it seem at least that his father was not. He tells the grandmother that he and his father did the same sort of misdeeds, but his father knew how to handle things so he did not get in trouble.
He can vaguely remember that he was once not a bad boy, but that he got in trouble, got sent to jail, and could no longer remember what he did once he was imprisoned. He states that his actions do not matter because eventually you are going to forget what you did and get in unjust trouble about it. While in the story he demonstrates that he has been exposed to Christianity, he has chosen to forget that punishment does have an end, that sin can be repented of and forsaken. He considers himself doomed to forever be punished for sins he cannot remember even committed. He has rejected God’s grace that would have removed that sin from his soul and assisted him in living a good life and going to Heaven upon death. However, in the story, his character is that of an evil presence entering a beautiful world, to prey on both the innocent and foolish. O’Connor means him as a tool of grace though in character traits he too echoes the Southern grotesque.
The Function of the Characters
Despite the obvious injustice done to Bailey, his wife and three children, the focus of the story remains on the interaction of Misfit and the grandmother, and most of the stories’ actions relay their conversations and movements. Misfit and the grandmother undoubtedly fall into the category of Southern grotesque. They are characters in O’Connor’s point of view whose functions are to instruct and enlighten the reader and, in the end, lift them up.
She believed that a story should immerse the reader in an experience, not define the story in an “abstraction” that will present the reader with a neat bundle, leaving them to ignore the drama that is weaving around them. While O’Connor explicitly rejected the idea that her stories needed to have a theme, she wrote with this goal in mind (“Aspects Fiction” 36). In later essays, O’Connor wrote that she considered Misfit as a symbol of the goad that pushes the soul to redemption. She believed that the job of the writer was to force the reader to make the journey of redemption and the heal the evils of the past (Breit 5).
The Climax: A Journey into the Woods
While the story really begins when the family deviates onto the dirt road that leads to their death, the last setting of story is the climax of their journey, and it can be divided into four sections. It begins when Misfit is foolishly identified by the grandmother leading to the killing a Bailey and his son, the killing of the mother, baby, and daughter and finally the murder of the grandmother. In each division, the grandmother tries to define Misfit as a good man, to urge him to find the good man in himself and endeavors him to persuade him towards religion. This four-part sequence of events is the climax of the story; all actions and prior events lead to the scene of the car accident.
In the accident, O’Connor is concerned with forcing her characters to step out of their mundane routine lives, to accept God’s grace and to participate in that which is beyond themselves. The story is meant to have anagogical meaning. In this, she mirrors early Christian writers who looked at scripture on an allegorical level where one thing leads logically to the other, a tropological or what an individual is called to do and an anagogical level which deals with how a human understands and follows the divine (“Nature Fiction” 63).
She wrote in a way that the process should move logically to unveil hidden meaning. O’Connor means the families travails to be a symbol of Christian and Catholic mystery. While she understands that there is other who will take the ending to be something other than Christian mystery, in her mind it is the only way she could write it.
O’Connor would have the reader realize that the grandmother and her family have begun an unstoppable journey as they detoured off the normal way onto the dirt road. The dirt road is unknown and untraveled. There is no evidence that anyone other than them has travelled on it. Its pathway is a mystery and veers between red dusty depressions and the beautiful blue skies. Their step off the beaten path brings them into a skewed and dangerous land. The missing sun, forgotten plantation graveyards and foreboding woods are portending the signal that the ill-fated family is entering a transformative and dangerous realm. The first step onto this path is of course initiated by the grandmother and a result of her foolishness and clinging onto the grotesqueness of the idealized southern past. The folly of the grandmother is the trigger that leads to the families undoing and sudden death.
The Moment of Confrontation
Despite the grandmother telling her daughter in law that she would never take her children around a criminal like Misfit, she is the one who is responsible for them meeting him. She has forced the family to exit to see a plantation that she remembers only in idealized childhood memories, she does not own up to her misdirection and blurts out the identity of a serial killer without thinking. In vain, in front of the woods that “gaped like a dark open mouth,” she realizes her mistake, realizes that he has a gun and asks him if he would shoot a lady.
While on the surface it is bizarre question, it is her attempt to reformat the situation to be in an environment where man is not of common blood and are considered good men. Misfit, however, identifies that environment they are in to be apart from goodness. He points out the lack of the sun, which in O’Connor’s writing can be attributed to a distance from God, and in her thought opportunity to seek out grace and the redemption of the soul. In the story it is a chance for the grandmother, her family and Misfit and his group to choose grace.
In this dire situation, Bailey is the only one who gives any verbal evidence that he understands the dangerous situation they are in. Though he curses his mother’s foolish speech, which in the Southern context of the story identified as a sin, in the end he acts with bravery. In his journey of redemption, he does not try to escape, to run away from his family into the woods. He tells his mother that they will be right back and takes his son’s hand to reassure him that it will all be fine. Out of his mundane worldly orientated life he has found grace. A gun shot rings off in the distance and he then goes to his death.
Even as she vainly calls for her son, the grandmother and Misfit have a second conversation. She again tells him that he is a good man, that he is not common. Unlike their first conversation, Misfit does not accept her label. He tells her that his daddy labeled him from an early age as a criminal. Though he adds that his father was just as criminal as him, that his father was simply better at getting away with it. Misfit notes that somebody has always been after him.
In reply to the grandmother’s question that if he prays, he tells her no, and reminisces about his life of crime. He tells her he could not remember what he did to first get into trouble, but he felt that once judgement and punishment started there was no way to end it. That he was forever trapped within their cycle. He implies that he was a gospel singer once, and presumably prayed, but analytically he has seen his own father and others sin worse and not be punished for their misdeeds. He tells the grandmother that he does not want to pray to Jesus because he is doing fine on his own.
The mother and her daughter and baby are then taken by the other henchmen into the wood to be murdered. The mother understands the danger but still goes with them to join her husband and son in death. The sky is still both without the sun and without clouds, there is nothing but the deep mysterious woods that she enters of her own choice. O’Connor writes that mother as an innocent, preoccupied with her infant, while ignoring her older children, but still an innocent. Even in her limitations, she also goes with dignity to her redemption.
The Final Transformation
Even though the grandmother does not show outward signs that she comprehends to finality of her family’s death, she curses Jesus. Her southern proper lady accouterments have failed her, as has her God. Misfit agrees with her about the awful unfairness of life. He says he does not understand why some are punished and others are not punished at all for worse misdeeds. He compares himself to Jesus, only he notes Jesus was innocent and he is not, even though he thinks he has been punished more than he deserves.
He listens to the grandmother who again labels him of good blood and declines her offer of money. He too, curses Jesus, and says the value in life is meanness, while the grandmother questions whether Jesus raised anyone from the dead. He investigates the deep woods, that woods that signify death’s mystery, and he says that Jesus should never have raised anyone from the dead. Misfit reasons it leaves open the question, that if death leads to God, then why not throw away this life, and go to heaven. Or if on the other hand, God does not exist, then not spend the short life we have enjoying pleasures, even if it is only pleasure derived from meanness.
On the precipice of life and death, the grandmother agrees and says that maybe Jesus did not raise the dead. As he prepares to murder the grandmother, Misfit laments that he was not there to see Jesus perform his miracles, that if he saw them and knew for sure there was a heaven, he would have been a different person. In a last minute of clarity, as he says this, the grandmother sees him as one of her own children and offers him comfort. She recognizes Misfit as one of her own children and welcomes him as her baby. She dies, smiling at the sky, having found grace within her last actions.
When his fellow criminals return and label the grandmother a talker, Misfit, in an interlude of defenselessness, and perhaps an understanding towards God’s grace, says that “she would have been a good woman…if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” If the grandmother has had the terror of facing the dark woods and needing the choose grace in her lifetime, she would have had the wisdom to reject her flawed definitions of who was a good man, who was of good blood of which both questions have not place in the goodness of God. If she had chosen God and goodness in her lifetime, she would have rejected southern grotesqueness and chosen God’s grace. Now she was forced with pain to confront her sins, she chose the correct action.
The Anglican C.S Lewis points out:
“God whispers in our pleasure, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains.” (Lewis)
While C.S Lewis would reject the Catholic creed that states that a soul is given a chance of grace at death and the choice they make decides their destination, the overarching idea remains the same, that pain and anguish spurs the soul to God.
By Christian definition, all are sinners and fall short of the glory of God, that all are admonished not to judge lest they be judged. Under God’s grace, the sinful family is cleaned by their good actions and decisions, by the same measure, Misfit stands in the same situation. When the less morally astute criminal remarks that would be great fun to shoot a woman every minute, Misfit tells him to shut up because there is no real pleasure to be found in choosing meanness in life. Like the grandmother and family, Misfit stands in the woods facing his own moral choice of grace. O’Connor ends the story and leaves Misfit an open question. His path is still open for him.
Conclusion
Flannery O’Connor died of lupus at the age of 39. Like her father before her, she suffered greatly before her death. Her writing reflects her suffering and knowledge of her impending death.
After her death, she directed her estate to add an epitaph to “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” She paraphrases a section of text from the writings of St. Cyril of Jerusalem saying, “The dragon is by the side of the road, watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you. We go to the father of souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon.” (Michaels). It is an allegory that speaks of death and the moral choice to avoid evil that all souls are given. The dragon stands for the devil who wants to snatch souls from the possibility of the gift of God’s grace.
O’Connor would have been well acquainted with the original text written by St. Cyril:
”Great is the prize set before you… remission of sin… a new spiritual birth, a shining garment, a holy seal inviolate… delights of paradise… the grace of the adoption of sons. But the dragon lies in ambush for the traveler; take care he does not bite you and inject his poison of unbelief… he selects and stalks his prey… In your journey to the father of soul, your way lies past that dragon.” (Cyril)
O’Connor in her pain looked for her prize though faith and just belief, the grandmother and family find redemption though their moral actions and the story ends with the still available choice for Misfit.