A Good Man Is Hard To Find Themes Analysis Essay Example

Flannery O'Connor's many works heavily rely on religious themes to express her belief that God's love and forgiveness are available to people in everyday life. O'Connor portrays this religious message in "A Good Man Is Hard To Find" by "creating" selfish and unobservant characters who are unable to see these acts of everyday grace in their lives. Themes that run through these stories include faith, grace, hopelessness, and evil. By utilizing the changes that America was experiencing in the mid-1990s, O'Connor was able to channel her inner thoughts on society and share them through her own philosophies. She based them on a combination of religion, life experience, and irony. There is a scene in the story where the evil man, also known as The Misfit, appears and turns the family's lives upside down. He saw no use for a knife other than to torture others. He can be viewed as a horrific figure or as God's main adversary, Satan. The grandmother in the story, on the other hand, is portrayed as a confident woman until she meets The Misfit. The Misfit felt rejected by God, but the grandmother chose to treat God as if he were something she could accept or reject depending on her situations.“Finally she found herself saying, "Jesus, Jesus," meaning, Jesus will help you, but the way she was saying it, it sounded as if she might be cursing,” (O’Connor 15) after failed attempts to alleviate the situation and an ineffable sense of unease, the grandmother tries to regain her voice. Without advice, power, folk platitudes, or the backing of a naive faith, the grandmother is faced with an incident that cannot be described; her usual means of self-assurance, which have been continually perverted by someone who does not fit in society, have entirely gone. O'Connor forced her characters to confront God's redemption and choose whether to accept or reject it. O'Connor's characters show that having a belief can be discovered in a variety of ways, demonstrating that God's grace can be revealed to the world. “Throughout the story, the grandmother, a lady of the highest propriety, also exhibits racist tendencies, a knack for gossip, an ingrained sense of religious mores, and never hesitates to advise others”(Dan). In the story O'Connor also illustrates that there are good people and bad people who continue to believe they are doing the right thing. The grandma makes the mistake of believing that her moral characteristics are self-evident. She never apologizes for her flaws or acknowledges them. She's a morally tainted individual. The grandmother's notion of "good" plainly puts her beauty first. She dressed herself, for example, so that "In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady" (O’Connor 4).  She is more concerned about what people will think of her than she is about dying. Each story revolves around a self-assured protagonist, generally a woman, who believes she is above reproach and boasts about her own accomplishments, Christian goodness, and material wealth. Each core character has hidden fears that are brought to light by an outsider character who acts as a catalyst for the protagonist's perception to change.

Slavery had been abolished in the South by the time Flannery O'Connor was born, but society remained tightly divided along racial and socioeconomic lines. Despite the fact that black Americans were no longer enslaved, Jim Crow laws meant that they were still subjected to discrimination and had little rights and freedoms of their own. The inequalities between landowners and their laborers, as well as between blacks and whites, meant that the South continued to struggle, and many whites harbored romanticized versions of the "Old South," a feeling that was sometimes linked to grief over the Civil War's loss. As O'Connor's writing depicts, religious faith was an important component of "Old South" life, both in her personal faith and in her portrayal of "religious" people as liars and hypocrites. O'Connor tackles fundamental questions about good and evil, morality and immorality, faith and doubt, and the distinctively Southern "binaries" of black and white and Southern history and progress in "A Good Man is Hard to Find." “What has not been seen, though, are the ways in which this undertone is augmented via repeated allusions, not to violence and death in general, but to the specific locus of evil that still haunted the South even during O'Connor's lifetime: the Civil War”(Flint). In the story, there were a few references to the Civil War. When the grandma mentions Stone Mountain as one of the "interesting details of the scenery," it is the first obvious allusion to the War. “The carving on Stone Mountain had been planned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, a group of women committed to a romanticized picture of the Confederacy and of the society it endeavored to perpetuate”(Flint). The second Civil War connection is "Gone with the Wind." Soon after leaving Atlanta, the family comes across a small cemetery with only five or six graves. According to the grandmother, that must have been a local plantation's family graveyard. "Gone With the Wind.... Ha. Ha," the grandmother says when John Wesley wonders where the plantation is now. However, O'Connor broadens the focus beyond one war, as though in accord with the larger ideas she is making. From the moment we meet the family with whom we travel, it appears like they are embroiled in a small-scale civil war, and violence is the order of the day until towards the end of the trip. As a result, conflict, injustice, war, and bloodshed are frequently introduced well before The Misfit and his crew perform the terrible murders that bring the novel to a close. The Civil War is the major, recurring picture that leads us to that conclusion, but the story is replete with so many memories of evil that the outcome seemed all but predetermined. 

"A Good Man is Hard to Find," by Flannery O'Connor, things concealed, buried, unsaid, and unsayable have dragged me along since the first page of this story. O'Connor introduces me to the enigma which is detail. It all starts when we don't know what The Misfit did to "these people" in Florida. Of course, we can make up scenarios. We also discover that Pitty Sing is hidden in the backseat by the grandma, that police officers hide behind billboards, and that most of Stone Mountain is hidden beneath Atlanta's surface. Her stories are about conversion, about a character changing as a result of "the action of grace," as she called it. With elegance, she emphasized the difficulty in the encounter. Faith could be emotionally upsetting for her, causing upheaval before giving ultimate happiness. She had a deep sense of solidarity and compassion for those who were searching for answers, and she had little patience for arrogant faith. Faith was delicate to her, and fearing you'd lost it was "an experience that in the long run belongs to faith." It wasn't only a matter of knowing; it also required self-giving. “What I sense and feel in this extraordinary story is a somber yet comical rhythm, virtually unbroken, of mystery and enigma, of fate and perversity--a narrative set down to us with the bold and brutal beauty of things darkly buried that must not remain buried” (Gresham). Not only did O'Connor's story provide an outside perspective on faith, grace, and evil. However, she employs irony and every detail in her story to help us understand her experiences and the historical period in which they occurred. She translates her inner thoughts into a story for us to comprehend how terrible the world was, and for us to read it today and see no difference between how the world was then and how it is now. We can see what she has been through just by listening to her story, and it is enough for her to write stories with tragic endings. It seemed to me that she also understood how fate works, the grandmother's fate develops from within, from the rubble of her past and her erroneous memory. As a devout Catholic, Flannery O'Connor used symbolism and irony to describe her characters throughout the stories. Flannery O'Connor's story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find '' is one of those stories that is meaningful from every perspective of detail, with deep meaning that chills the reader.