Molash 1
Michael Molash
A Good Man Is Hard to Find: A Story of Love, Honesty, and Virtue
Cistercian Preparatory School
Molash 1
A Good Man Is Hard to Find: A Story of Love, Honesty, and Virtue
Flannery O’Connor, in her short story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” aims to expose problems she thinks riddle nearly every member of society, problems that nearly go unrecognized and unaddressed as compared to other problems considered more taboo. The central flaws that her fiction identifies are selfishness, fixation on outward appearance, and arrogance. She explores these societal challenges especially through the conversations between her characters. To this purpose, she creates a distinctly human family, a family without perfect unity and without perfect members. A real family, one that is very familiar to the reader: it contains a son resentful and impatient towards his mother, a scornful mother-in-law, and a set of obnoxious and disrespectful children. This formula spawns a typical family undergoing tension. O’Connor then establishes each family member’s flaws through the conversations that he has with his family and with the outside world.Through this demonstration of each family member’s flaws, O’Connor reveals her insights into the troubles of society and these troubles’ consequences. However, she ultimately leaves the reader with a glimmer of hope for salvation.
This family and its struggles are presented in the opening lines of the story. The grandmother first reveals her personality in the first paragraph, when she tries to convince her son Bailey to go to Tennessee instead of Florida. The grandmother’s unwillingness to put her family’s desires over her own shows her relentless selfishness. In her attempt to persuade her son, the grandmother tries to use guilt to scare Bailey away from his plans. After discussing the Misfit, she futilely remarks, “’I wouldn’t take my children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it. I couldn’t answer to my conscience if I did’” (CS 117). While very few are innocent of trying to employ guilt to their aid, Bailey’s reaction to grandmother’s attempt revealsthat this strategy is by no means unusual for the grandmother: “Bailey didn’t look up from his reading” (CS 117). Bailey's reacts to his mother's guilt trip in a way that makes it clear he is used to his mother's antics. However, the grandmother doesn’t give up at this defeat. She appeals to the children’s mother, who doesn’t acknowledge her either. In fact, the only people who recognize that she is speaking are June Star and John Wesley, who chime in to belittle their grandma: June Star says, “’She wouldn’t stay at home to be queen for a day…She wouldn’t stay at home for a million bucks’” (CS 117-118) and John Wesley snarkily comments that if he saw the Misfit he would “’smack his face’” (CS 118). In this short conversation, O’Connor provides us with a picture of the family she has contrived, but that is all too familiar; she shows us the selfish grandmother, the weathered father and mother, and the irreverent children.
As the family piles into the car in preparation to go to Florida, the familial discord is presented once again, in the context of a disagreement over taking the grandmother’s cat. The narrator gives a long explanation of why the grandmother wants to bring Pitty Sing along. She thinks that her cat will be too lonely without her and that he might accidentally asphyxiate himself by brushing against a gas burner. Bailey’s reason for leaving the cat is describes in one succinct sentence: “Her son, Bailey, didn’t like to arrive at a motel with a cat” (CS 118). O’Connor uses this contrast in length to show Bailey’s personality. In this case, the grandmother has a somewhat legitimate concern, albeit a bit farfetched; however, Bailey will not let the cat come only because it makes finding a motel a little more difficult. Once again we see the family’s refusal to put someone else’s wishes before their own.
While the family is still loading into the car, we begin to see both the grandmother’s arrogance and her scorn of her daughter-in-law. When she describes the grandmother’s outfit, O’Connor uses a focalized point of view, in which she describes the situation based on one of her characters’ point of view. O’Connor says, “The children’s mother still had on slacks and still had her head tied up in a green kerchief, but the grandmother had on a navy blue straw sailor hat with a bunch of white violets on the brim and a navy blue dress with a small white dot in the print…In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady.” (CS 118). With this peek into the grandmother’s thoughts, it obvious that she is contrasting herself with the children’s mother. She thinks that if anyone saw her dead on the side of the road they would know she was lady, with the implication that if someone saw the children’s mother on the side of the road, they wouldn’t know she was a lady. This is not only arrogant, but it also introduces one of the key flaws O’Connor is identifying: a fixation on appearance.
This idea reappears during the road trip both when the grandmother spots a poor black child and when the family visits Red Sammy’s Famous Barbecue restaurant.As they are driving, the grandmother exclaims, “‘Oh look at the cute little pickaninny!’” (CS 119). The grandmother is not concerned at all about the boy’s condition, uncaringly remarking later that “’Little niggers in the country don’t have things like we do’” (CS 119). Instead she remarks that he, in such a destitute condition is “cute.” She seems to feel no sorrow or sympathy for the poor child, instead focusing on how it would “’make a picture’” (CS 119). Once the family arrives at Red Sammy’s to eat some of his famous barbeque, Red Sam’s wife compliments June Star. But in response, June Star makes a snide remark, “‘I wouldn’t live in a broken-down place like this for a million bucks!’” (CS121), once again showing her irreverence to her elders. The grandmother and Red Sam then agree that things aren’t like they used to be. The grandmother says that “’People are certainly not nice like they used to be’” (CS 122), and he acknowledges that “’Everything is getting terrible’” (CS 122). The two are engaged in an almost pharisaic conversation. They are on their high horses proclaiming that everything around them is getting terrible and everyone around them is acting worse, without acknowledging that they might be part of the problem too. The grandmother even goes so far as to pass the blame to all of Europe, and he concurs. O’Connor reveals the arrogance and disrespect that the family exhibits through examples to which the reader can relate.
After leaving Red Sammy’s, the grandmother remembers a plantation she visited when she was younger. Though Bailey does not want to spend the time to visit it, the grandmother lies in order to get her way: “’There was a secret panel in the house,’ she said craftily, not telling the truth but wishing that she were.” (CS 123). The grandmother wishes that she were telling the truth and that the secret panel actually exists, but it doesn’t. Even so, she lies to kick start her grandchildren’s obnoxious behavior, badgers her son into submission to her will. And her selfishness and deceit is finally successful.
After their car accident, O’Connor finally gives us some hope that we may overcome these societal issues. Immediately after the car wreck, each person still exhibits his or her negative qualities. The children run around obnoxiously, screaming, “’We’ve had an ACCIDENT!’” (CS 125), happy and oblivious of their imminent fates. Bailey says something to his mother that makes the Misfit turn redden. And the grandmother still exhibits her arrogance and obsession with appearance in her plea that “you ought not to shoot a lady” (CS 132).However, moments before their death each character has a change of heart. Bailey calls, “’I’ll be back in a minute, Mama, wait on me!’” (CS 128). He finally shows some love and compassion for his mother as he tries to reassure her that everything will be alright as he walks to his death. The children’s mother peacefully accepts her death, faintly agreeing to go join her husband in death. Even the children seem to finally obey their parents’ commands as they follow their parents with barely any resistance. The grandmother's conversion is less sudden. She begs for her life for a long time, refusing to accept her fate. However, her moment of catharsis is when she has exhausted all of her options except to speak exactly what she thinks, finally telling the truth. As the Misfit talks about his uncertainty of Christ's life, "the grandmother's head cleared for an instant" (CS 132), and she was able to see herself in the body of the misfit. Her catharsis finishes when she touches the Misfit in an act of loving care and proclaims, "'Why you're one of my babies. You're one of my own children!'" (CS 132). In this act, the grandmother proves that she is capable of love for someone besides herself. Even the psychopathic Misfit is able to see her conversion as he observes, "'She would have been a good woman...if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life'" (CS 133). He realizes that in her final moments she has been brought “from an understanding of goodness in conventional terms (being a lady) to a glimpse of O’Connor’s theological understanding of goodness” (McFarland 18), and, that because of this new understanding, she is able to achieve O’Connor’s idea of goodness for herself. At the end of her story, O'Connor finally provides us with some hope that we will find virtue, comfort, and goodness in our death.
Flannery O’Connor, by way of the conversation and actions of the family, shows the issues that she sees in mankind. She identifies the flaws as narcissism, obsession with appearance, and arrogance. However, she doesn’t only criticize humanity without leaving any hope for the reader; she provides examples of the children's mother finding peace in death, Bailey no longer resenting his mother, the children finally being reverent to their parents, and the grandmother having a sudden conversion to virtue, honesty, and love. O’Connor uses the conversations of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” to demonstrate both the flaws and consequences of those flaws that exist in modern civilization, while still providing the promise of virtue in death.
Molash 1
Works Cited
O'Connor, Flannery. The Complete Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971. Print.
McFarland, Dorothy Tuck. "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." Flannery O'Connor. New York:
Frederick Unger, 1976. 17-23. Print.