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WORKSHOPS » FICTION » FLANNERY O'CONNOR, "A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND" » EXPLORATIONS
Flannery O'Connor, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find"
BIOGRAPHY
Reading » Re-Reading » Explorations
Student Responses
Virginia Commonwealth University
Wow. That meddlesome old hag, if she had just kept her mouth shut, then . . . wait a second, if her son had only listened to her in the first place, then . . .
Clearly this is a case of role reversals . . . the grandmother, no longer in charge, wants so very much to be useful. Since she is no longer helpful to her son's life, then she might be helpful to the grandchildren. Doesn't she seem to act like a child . . . speaking without any forethought, acting impulsively? She needs to be the center of attention. She dominates all conversation. In fact she is the only person who holds any significant amount of conversation in her family at all. No wonder she is so restless; who wouldn't be with a family full of such dullards? (Right now she is looking down from the skies saying, "He's right, you know, it wasn't my fault . . . if you weren't such a bunch of dullards then that would never have happened. That could be John Wesley's boy in college right now.")
One must understand and feel for the old bag; but then again she got her entire family executed. It was entirely, without any question, her fault.
The characters are so familiar to me; not much has changed since the fifties where I grew up. Poor white trash was just that . . . a rare breed nowadays. Undisciplined children were capable of committing horrible acts of destruction, unwittingly, and never seeming to understand. [In these kinds of families] the grandmother had nothing to offer except for bad advice and ridiculous gossip. The type of grandmother who, through complete ineptitude, could devastate any situation, then walk away saying that you should have listened to her in the first place.
The end of the story is violent and ironic—a very good combination. I was not surprised that people were killed at the end, but I was surprised that the entire family was executed. I guess things became ominous when the grandmother had her sudden realization (the house in Tennessee). If that didn't cap it off and then if the wreck wasn't enough, then the HEARSE-LIKE CAR, was pretty much the taker.
I really enjoyed the character of The Misfit; I found him slightly amusing and immensely satisfying. I love a good bad-guy and he is one of the best ever (After reading this I can think of about a dozen movie characters who were styled after him), and "THE FAT BOY WITH THE HAPPY LAUGH"! Red Sammy was a very profound character as well.
The grandmother took catnaps; maybe that's why she brought her cat along, so she could have someone to take catnaps with! The grandmother, like I said before, likes to feel useful even if it is only a cat; she also likes to be in charge subtly. It seems, like the grandmothers I knew before, that she has a habit of subtle sabotage. She needs to be able to control the destiny of a situation. She needs to go so far as to control the destiny of the cat. She is in definite command of the destiny of the hapless crew aboard the S.S. Ill-fated. She would impose her power at any given moment just by whining and sitting on the motel bed, or not being satisfied with her room. These actions are minor, but they can cause a reaction that will usually achieve her desired effect. She makes up ridiculous excuses for bringing the cat, but it is really just the ground floor of some sabotage. Bailey allows her because it's easier than arguing and he'd really just rather be having a beer in sunny Florida. Her attitude towards the small black boy shows that she, like these other grannies, comes from a time of a different attitude. Basically she is a racist pig, but who wasn't from her era and area? (It is disgusting.)
THE FAT BOY WITH THE HAPPY LAUGH! I've met Red Sammy before, usually after his wife left him, which was right after the business went bankrupt, which is right after he drank his last cent. The Happy Fat Boy didn't seem all that happy, did he? Again, he is from another time in the American South, like Grandma. It's seems that after the war and until about twenty-five years ago, the only thing the South had going for it was memories of how ladies used to be treated, or of this and that. DELUSIONS! Sammy and Grandma are no different. Ever since time began the generation before was so much more polite and courteous and you could leave your door unlocked. We're getting to about 1985, by now, right? In Manhattan maybe '78.
"Ungh! I remember time when you could leave Saber-tooth Tiger carcass for week. Now you got to guard it all day. And they still club you and take it! Not even thank you." That tired line is B.S. No matter how true it is, and it is. The Misfit knows this. He knows that all of the pretenses are a farce, there is no substance, nothing real in any of it. Red Sammy is no good man. He abuses his wife. She is subservient to him; he is not honest to himself.
The Misfit is honest. He has no reason to be otherwise. He has no shame, humiliation, and no pride. He is just a ruthless murderer who kills old ladies emotionlessly. Albeit he learns something when he kills them, but he could hardly be considered a hero. (I was going to try to approach him as one, but it would take a week to qualify that statement. So he isn't!) Nor is he an anti-hero. All we have in this story are victims. A chain reaction of victimization, starting with the system victimizing The Misfit, who victimizes the family and everyone else he comes in contact with.
Well o.k. that doesn't make for much of a chain. A pendulum of victimization, shall we say. Society at large the fulcrum; The Misfit the actual arm swinging; everyone he comes in contact with . . . Poe's feverishly fantasized victim, except not saved at the last minute by the French.
The Misfit is sagacious for a dumb hick isn't he? His two last lines hold a truth that cannot be denied by Monk or Mephistopheles, Saint or Satan, Cherubim or Chimera, Seraphim or Succubus, etc. . . .
I think Granny and The Misfit both found what they were looking for. Granny found spirituality, with her last living words, "You're one of my own children!"; The Misfit found another philosophical triumph, "She would have been a good woman . . . if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life. It's no real pleasure in life. Lady, there never was a body that give the undertaker a tip." Whether he has a clue about what he is talking about or not is beside the point. You must assume that he does. Not because of "Suspension of Disbelief" or any of that crap, but simply . . .
"I've got a gun . . . If a tree falls in the woods and there is nobody in earshot, does it make a sound?"
"Well of course it does, duh!"
"POW! " "Nope, it don't."
And that is the ultimate truth.
James Zitz
The grandmother was the main character, so the one we got aquainted with best. I think that she meant well, but was growing old, and with that became sort of forgetful. I felt really bad for her because I don't think the other family members treated her as well as they should. She was just old. She did not seem to want to do any harm. Bailey treated her the worst of anyone. He disrespected her and completely disregarded her feelings. The mother seemed to be incredibly submissive, and would not step into any conversation unless she was directly spoken to. The children were spoiled little kids with the attitude that is common among kids their age, but were unusually rude as well. The grandmother was responsible for basically the whole plot. It was her fault that they were on that little dirt road at that time, in that place when the accident happened, but if the family had paid attention to her wishes for vacation spots, they would never be driving to Florida anyway. That way they never would have been close to the house she thought she knew.
I was completely shocked by the ending. I figured something bad would happen instead of the grandmother showing The Misfit if he prayed he would be healed, etc., and they all would go free. I did not expect that he would kill them all until on page 689, "There was a pistol shot from the woods, followed closely by another. Then silence." That's when I realized they killed Bailey and John Wesley. I figured it would only get worse from there on out.
I think the southern setting is so important because it says a lot about the grandmother. It helps us understand how she was brought up, and it explains a lot about her manners and habits. She was so excited to be back in the Deep South where she grew up and had boyfriends like Mr. Edgar Atkins Teagarden, that all of her old feelings and emotions came back with her surroundings. This got her started on tangents of the old days, and houses she visited, people she knew, etc. This has everything to do with why they pulled onto the dirt road, because she had built all of her memories back up in her head and wanted desperately to try and relive them.
I would consider this a dark comedy. I laughed many times throughout the story. The description of the mother's appearance was hilarious, as was when the grandmother realized they were in the wrong state than the house she remembered was in. This was before they wrecked, of course. The family's interactions were very funny when they interacted at all. They were each strong characters in their own way, so when they came together in conversation, it was always amusing. The irony of the whole story and its outcome is also a little humorous—also very sad. If the family had listened to the grandmother the first time, they would never be there, yet they listen to her the second time, only because the kids are complaining, and it just so happens this is the wrong time to listen to her. Unfortunately it is not a mistake they will even be able to regret making.
Olympia Meola
I didn't find any of the characters to be very likable but I found the grandmother to be the most colorful. She was the most responsible for the story's development. Although she couldn't persuade the family to go to Tennessee she was perhaps the family's most powerful member. She knew how to pull everyone's strings and used the children to aggravate Bailey until he complied with her wishes. I suppose I have sympathy for her; I don't feel she deserved to die.
The grandmother in this story could have been modeled after either of my own grandmothers. They are both aristocrats from small southern towns and have the same class mentality as this grandmother does. They believe that they are the products of superior genes. I've always found this conviction somewhat hypocritical considering that they are also Christians (Fundamentalists, of course). O'Connor, being a devout Christian herself, uses this flaw in "her" grandmother to show that breeding is irrelevant to character.
Julien Morriss
The characters in this story are very entertaining. The main and most complex character is, obviously, the grandmother. She, like many elderly people, has a longing for how things were in their time (what they were brought up in, what they were used to and familiar with). I think this longing is a significant factor in the story line. She longs to see "her connections in east Tennessee." She told stories about her past and of the "old burying ground. That belonged to the plantation." When they stopped at the Tower, "He and the grandmother talked about better times," which meant looking back at the days people could be trusted. It's ironic and a bit humorous that this longing is what gets them into conflict, when they get into the accident. Grandmother is again longing for the past, and wants to see an old plantation she used to visit as a young lady. What makes it humorous is that she has forgotten it is not really there and it is actually in Tennessee!
The children (in my opinion) serve as another humorous tactic the author uses. They are spoiled and disrespectful in the usual (almost common childlike) manner. They have a disrespectful tone of voice toward their grandmother as they joke with her for not wanting to ever stay home. They are spoiled and unmannered when they mock the states of Georgia and Tennessee as being "just a hillbilly dumping ground" and when they kick and scream to have their way with their father in seeing the house in the old plantation.
Bailey, the son, seems like a dull and pessimistic person. The author describes him as "not having a naturally sunny disposition." He, like every other character in the story, seems to have no respect for the grandmother. He yells at everyone in the car when they beg to see the house in the plantation. He yells at the grandmother when they are found by the misfits: "Bailey turned his head sharply and said something to his mother that even shocked the children." (I wonder what that was; and does the phrase "even shocked the children" mean Bailey often yells at her and the children are so used to it that not many things shock them?) It is humorous (and sad in a way) that when they get in an accident the grandmother actually hopes she is fairly injured so as to avoid Bailey's anger toward her. The author states, "The grandmother was curled up under the dashboard, hoping she was injured so that Bailey's wrath would not come down at her all at once."
I also caught a little foreshadowing. As they depart for the car trip the author describes what the grandmother is wearing: "her collar and cuff were white organdy trimmed with lace and at her neckline she had pinned a purple spray of cloth violets containing a sachet. In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady."
The climax of the story is reached when they are in the accident, stuck in the ditch, and found by the misfits. I thought the misfits finding them was rather ironic and it is odd that the misfits give the grandmother more respect (while in conversation) than her own bloodline did.
In my opinion, this story is definitely dated. Random crime and stories like this are not shocking anymore. In my first reading the ending was a shocker because I put myself in the setting and I never thought of them actually getting killed. As I read it the second time it did not shock me at all for I realized the enormous amount of violent obscene and graphic crime all over the world and in the media.
Cecile Abuel
This story was not at all what I expected from the title. I expected it to be about finding a good man to marry, or something. I loved the characters of the children and the grandmother. They were really stereotypical portrayals of both. The grandmother was the cause of all the trouble in this story. She got Bailey to turn onto the road where they wrecked because the cat that she secretly brought jumped on Bailey's shoulders as he was driving. When The Misfit shows up she just has to open up her big mouth and say that she recognized him as The Misfit, thus making it necessary for him (and his sidekicks) to shoot the family so they wouldn't turn them in. The end puzzled me. Was The Misfit really one of her children, perhaps who she gave up for adoption, or did she mean it in a spiritual sense? I'm interested to read/hear what others made of this line at the end of the story.
The grandmother in the story seems to annoy the rest of the family, but she really loves her family. She talks too much, and tells stories which are dated and tend to annoy the family. She brings the cat along because she didn't want to leave the cat alone for three days, for fear that it would get lonely, and it might brush up against the oven knobs and turn on the gas, asphyxiating itself. The grandmother's attitude about the negro child shows that she looks at "negroes" as being at a disadvantage in the world; it also shows that she is sympathetic to their lifestyle, and doesn't think poorly of them because she thinks that they can't help it. She won't make fun of people less fortunate than herself.
The scene at Sammy's showed poor white people in their surroundings. I think that it is ironic that Sammy says "a good man is hard to find" as if he's a good man. He treats his wife like a slave, while he sits around with his fat gut doing nothing. He is not what comes to my mind when I think of a good man. I think that this story is somewhat prophetic of the random violence of modern-day America. I don't think it's dated at all.
The final scene between the grandmother and The Misfit was somewhat confusing to me. The grandmother is fixed on trying to make The Misfit pray to Jesus, but The Misfit says that Jesus threw everything off. He says he doesn't want any help because he's doing just fine by himself. He doesn't feel that he's really done anything wrong. He says he doesn't even remember what he was punished for, so he's started to keep a record of everything he does, in order to hold it up next to the punishment he gets for it and see if it's justified. In the end the grandmother is crazy with fear, not knowing what she is saying. The Misfit says, "No pleasure but meanness." The grandmother keeps saying that she knows he's from good blood, and he says he is. Just because someone comes from good blood doesn't mean that they themselves are good.
The grandmother is extremely self-serving throughout this story. In the end when she says, "You are one of my children," I think that perhaps she is realizing that she might not be the good person she always felt, and said she was, but that she had similar traits as The Misfit. They are both self-serving and seem to not care what others think, or want. I think she realizes her sin just in time, right before she dies.
Meg Howell
This story is a good one. No one ever thinks about just how good their lives are until the end of their lives. The father, Bailey, sat in his chair at home ignoring his mother and his kids and barely noticing that his wife was there. He never was mentioned to have smiled. He was miserable. The mother seemed a little less oblivious, but seemed not to be too concerned with life herself. The kids both had smart mouths and no respect for adults, namely their grandmother. The grandmother seemed to be the only one who cared about anything. She also seemed to be in the stage of her life where she knew that she was past her prime and was very nostalgic about her prime. She seemed to savor everything that had happened to her. She seemed to be the only character who loved life all along. The grandmother seemed to be the only character who believed that there could have possibly been some good in everyone. Everyone else had become just as cynical as The Misfit. It is interesting that the others (besides the grandmother) did not realize just how sweet life is until they were at the end of theirs. I think that the moral of the story here is to make the most out of what you have today because it may not last another day!
The grandmother is a misfit herself. She values life but does not feel that everyone's life is just as valuable, as we can see as she talks about the "little pickaninny" and when she tells The Misfit that she just knows that he comes from good blood. Even Red Sammy, whom the grandmother considers a good man, isn't. He treats his wife like she's his servant as well. I'm not quite sure why the grandmother brings her cat along unless it is to have something along that seems to find her valuable because her family sure doesn't seem to treasure her. I'm not sure if O'Connor is trying to say that it is because we have practically taken God out of society that society seems to be on a decline. I do know that during the 1920s there was a big stink about taking God out of society and letting the good times roll. I also know that that is also the blame for the decline of society. I don't believe that this idea is dated. I am a religious person but not a fanatic but I believe in this message. I do, however, believe that the grandmother is dated. She has not stopped referring to black Americans as "pickaninnies" and she is somewhat stuck in her past. Perhaps things weren't better then, as she and Red Sammy seem to think, but just handled a little differently.
Melissa Hatchett
This story was somewhat confusing at the end. Why did the old lady say that The Misfit was "one of [her] own children"? I am not sure I understand that statement. As far as the rest of the story, I saw the terrible state elderly people exist in. She felt and the family felt she was useless. I wonder if her family was taking her to Florida to "drop" her off. Is that why she did not want to go? It was also pretty obvious that the family would meet up with The Misfit; did anyone else think so? You had an idea about the meeting at the very beginning when the grandmother was discussing it as a way to avoid the trip to Florida. I expected the meeting when the black car came back. The car just seemed ominous. What about the comment The Misfit makes at the end of the story: "She would have been a good woman, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." Does that mean that her life was "lifeless"? Did she have no reason to live? Is she happier in death than in life? Why does she smile at the end? Obviously I have way more questions than answers for this story. At first I thought the story would be a comment about how people and society in general treat their elderly, but in the end I don't know what this story means.
Mary Nguyen
One question that this story has always brought up for me is what is our relationship to the past and history, and what does it say about us as a society? The grandmother is obsessed with the past. She prefers the lifestyle and the way people behaved to the present. It is the grandmother's slippery grasp on the past (she is mistaken about the location of the plantation) that gets them in trouble. Also, if she had not glorified the past by making up the lie about the silver being hidden in the plantation house, no one would have wanted to go in the first place.
The grandmother seems to be the misfit in this family. No one likes her much, and she has very different values from the rest of them. To her it is important to at least appear to be a lady, and a good person.
The grandmother's attitude toward the black child is very telling. She says, "Oh look at the cute little pickaninny!" This is another example of her living in the past. At one point in history, this was a very acceptable and proper thing to say about a black child. I am sure she sees nothing wrong with what she has said. However, her comment shows her to be ignorant and uncaring. Why couldn't she have said oh what a cute little black child (this is Georgia in the 50s)? I am sure when this story was written, no one would have expected her to be politically correct. But taken out of that context, her comment seems to emphasize her love of the past, and I think it shows a better side of her in a way. The grandmother patiently explains to her grandson that the child was not wearing "britches" because he did not have any, not because he did not know any better. She seems to be telling her grandson that not everyone in the world is as lucky as they are.
I am still not sure about The Misfit. I know a lot has been read into his character (and the grandmother's) over the years. But I am not sure if it all quite jibes. Another question I have is who is Red Sam and what is he doing in the story? I have heard theories that he symbolizes the devil, but I don't really buy that. So what is his role?
I have always found what the grandmother says to The Misfit at the end of the story interesting. She calls him one of her babies, one of her own children. Does this put the grandmother in the context of God, and The Misfit as man? I have always tended to believe more those theories that put The Misfit and the grandmother as Christ or the devil. What is so scary to me about The Misfit is his very ordinariness. He is so polite and considerate, yet he is a murderer.
Michele Trezona
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