A Good Man Is Hard To Find Analysis

The exiles of both men lead them to separate from Christ. In “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” the Misfit cannot reconcile a world that would remove him so thoroughly and without remorse with one in which Christ’s teachings are true, and has thus removed himself from both. When speaking with the Grandmother, he says, “Jesus shown everything off balance. It was the same with him as with me except He hadn’t committed any crime and they could prove I had committed one because they had the papers on me” (O’Connor, “A Good Man” 12). He understands himself to be similar to Christ, but where the people accepted Christ, they rejected him. He feels that, despite his crimes, he should be given a second chance, and if no one is going to give him that then no one should have done the same to Christ. O’Connor affirms this by calling him a “a prophet gone wrong”-- through his own actions and through the rejection of the society that raised him (O’Connor, “On Her Own Work”). Despite this, he still longs to reconnect with Christ. This comes out when he says, “‘I wasn't there so I …show more content…
Both men find the lack of spiritual virtue in their lives intolerable, and at the end of each of their respective texts they move back towards a place of fulfillment instead of lack. For the Misfit, this comes too late to save the Grandmother, but as O’Connor, puts it, “the old lady's gesture, like the mustard-seed, will grow to be a great crow-filled tree in the Misfits' heart, and will be enough of a pain to him there to turn him into the prophet he was meant to become” (O’Connor, “On Her Own Work”). This can be seen in the contrast between what he says after killing the Grandmother, “It's no real pleasure in life,” and his earlier maxim, “No pleasure in life but meanness” (O’Connor, “A Good Man” 13). The work is by no means done, but he has begun to head towards a place in which his spiritual lack will be