Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is a story about a family of six that meet their demise in the hands of a criminal known as The Misfit. There are several examples of foreshadowing that can lead the reader into what will ultimately be the family’s demise. O’Connor does not show any sympathy for the characters in this story, not even the innocent children or the baby in the family. Despite the terrible outcome of the family, I will show how this story can be considered a tale of redemption, which is given to the grandmother from one who is to become “a good man”.
The reader first hears of The Misfit when the second quote of the story is spoken from the unnamed grandmother while she rattles a newspaper at Bailey, father of the family and her only son. This was her attempt to convince Bailey to not take the vacation to Florida, but to east Tennessee instead. As the story unfolds, the family ends up encountering The Misfit after surviving a car accident, leaving the family stranded in the middle of nowhere. While The Misfit’s other two cohorts start taking family members off to the woods for execution, he begins revealing details of his past to the grandmother of the family, explaining why he ended up renaming himself. At first he mentions when his father told him he was a “different breed of dog from his brothers and sisters”(O’Connor, 405). This could imply that he is an illegitimate child, which is considered a misfit in the family. When asked if he had ever prayed before, he mentions that he was sent to the penitentiary for killing his father when he was nineteen, even though his father actually died of an epidemic flu which he had nothing to do with. Despite this claim, he was still sentenced to time in the penitentiary. With conviction, he states, “I call myself The Misfit because I can’t make what all I done wrong fit what all I gone through in punishment”(O’Connor, 408). But the irony of The Misfit does not end there.
There are more ironic qualities in The Misfit mainly because of the unnamed grandmother in the story. The grandmother posed a question asking if he would shoot a lady, his response was, “I would hate to have to”(O’Connor, 404). It’s ironic in the sense that he did in the very end. Another ironic moment of The Misfit is when he looks up at the sky. He sees no sun and no clouds, which would make the reader believe that night is upon them, yet the grandmother says that it’s a beautiful day. That passage is filled with irony since the reader would believe that a criminal mind would operate their deeds at night time, yet it’s still day time according to the grandmother. This void they converse about is foreshadowing for the grandmother’s transition to the other side being in sight. However, she’s not ready to accept it.
Some of the family went in the back woods with the two cohorts of The Misfit willingly, yet the kids were against the thought of doing so. During the family’s encounter with The Misfit, the grandmother of the family keeps telling him he’s a good man. As she keeps trying to flatter him and control him, it is as if she is trying to postpone her end because she is not ready to face death. Based on their conversation, it’s safe for me to assume that all her life she had been relying on her social status, flattery, and public opinion to deal with her predicaments. She tells stories over the short course of the trip. Her morality fell apart like her blue straw hat, which was symbolic of her morals fading away. She was privy to the knowledge of Christianity, but she never embraced it since she had doubts of the resurrection of Jesus near the end of the story. Therefore, all her talk of praying was flattery, postponing her end.
The grandmother’s most lucid moment was when the final gunshots went off in the woods. Upon analysis, the reader can consider this to be her sanity leaving her since she has a hole inside of her and needed a family to fill it, perhaps another Bailey since it was only his name she was calling out in his time of duress. She may have been confused, or just having a mental breakdown, but The Misfit was also wearing Bailey’s shirt at the end of the story. She calls him “one of her own children” for a reason, but I believe she was longing for a son. This startled The Misfit as he shot her three times.
In conclusion, there is an underlying Christian meaning to this scene since Roman Catholics believe that we are all God’s children, hence we are all related. It is as if God is speaking through the grandmother before her execution. The Misfit underwent a transformation afterward by putting his gun down and taking off his glasses. O’Connor described The Misfit stating, “Without his glasses, The Misfit’s eyes were red-rimmed and pale and defenseless-looking”(O’Connor, 408). He had a different outlook when his cohorts expressed their joy in killing, but The Misfit said, “It’s no real pleasure in life”(O’Connor 409). She had seen the truth of our existence in a biblical point of view, her stereotypes and loose opinions had diminished, and the grandmother was redeemed. The Misfit is most likely on his way to redemption as well, thus becoming a “good man”.
Works Cited
O’Connor, Flannery. “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” The Norton Introduction to Literature.
10th ed. Ed. Alison Booth and Kelly J. Mays. New York: Norton, 2010. pp. 396-409.
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