Flannery O’Connor: A Good Man is Hard to Find Flannery O’Conner’s short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is written with strong religious undertones. “The trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled” (O’Connor 377). This description of "silver-white sunlight" is imagery associated with Heaven. However, when she uses the word “meanest” it is perplexing to understand how something heavenly would highlight the meanest one. O’Connor is warning the reader of something cruel to come. Another warning comes when “They passed a large cotton field with five or six graves, fenced in the middle of it, like a small island” (O’Connor 377). This becomes very clear since the Bailey family has six members: Bailey, his
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The grandmother is concerned that Christ is no longer a part of people’s everyday life. For example, the grandmother considers herself morally superior over others due to her strong southern upbringing. In her eyes, that gives her permission to pass judgment onto others. She is a woman, who believes in God, but she is really very shallow, “The grandmother said she would have done well to marry Mr. Teagarden because he was a gentleman and had bought Coca-Cola stock when it first came out and that he had died only a few years ago, a very wealthy man” (O’Connor 378). This statement points out one of the grandmother 's most crucial flaws: she values money and material comforts over love and relationships. This is also evident in the way that she proclaims she will give all of her money to Jesus in exchange for …show more content…
“His voice seemed about to crack and the grandmother 's head cleared for an instant. She saw the man 's face twisted close to her own as if he were going to cry and she murmured, "Why you 're one of my babies. You 're one of my own children!" She reaches out and touches him on the shoulder. Grace enters abruptly when the grandmother reaches out to the Misfit. Petit says that the "gesture which somehow made contact with mystery" occurs when the grandmother sees "that she is responsible for the man before her and joined to him by ties of kinship" (Petit 312). Up to the moment when she touched his shoulder, he believed that the grandmother was trying to understand him, that she was sympathetic to his dilemma. However, when she calls him one of her “babies” he concludes that she is speaking for the society that had rejected him all along. He feels betrayed; he had opened himself up to her only to hear the same sermon all over again. This is exactly where the Misfit finds himself. He is one of the unregenerate, the lost. It’s not because of any wrong he’s done—that would have been easy enough to atone for. He’s damned because he is a “different breed of dog.” He is different because he can’t accept what people tell him; he wants to know everything for
The grandmother is concerned that Christ is no longer a part of people’s everyday life. For example, the grandmother considers herself morally superior over others due to her strong southern upbringing. In her eyes, that gives her permission to pass judgment onto others. She is a woman, who believes in God, but she is really very shallow, “The grandmother said she would have done well to marry Mr. Teagarden because he was a gentleman and had bought Coca-Cola stock when it first came out and that he had died only a few years ago, a very wealthy man” (O’Connor 378). This statement points out one of the grandmother 's most crucial flaws: she values money and material comforts over love and relationships. This is also evident in the way that she proclaims she will give all of her money to Jesus in exchange for …show more content…
“His voice seemed about to crack and the grandmother 's head cleared for an instant. She saw the man 's face twisted close to her own as if he were going to cry and she murmured, "Why you 're one of my babies. You 're one of my own children!" She reaches out and touches him on the shoulder. Grace enters abruptly when the grandmother reaches out to the Misfit. Petit says that the "gesture which somehow made contact with mystery" occurs when the grandmother sees "that she is responsible for the man before her and joined to him by ties of kinship" (Petit 312). Up to the moment when she touched his shoulder, he believed that the grandmother was trying to understand him, that she was sympathetic to his dilemma. However, when she calls him one of her “babies” he concludes that she is speaking for the society that had rejected him all along. He feels betrayed; he had opened himself up to her only to hear the same sermon all over again. This is exactly where the Misfit finds himself. He is one of the unregenerate, the lost. It’s not because of any wrong he’s done—that would have been easy enough to atone for. He’s damned because he is a “different breed of dog.” He is different because he can’t accept what people tell him; he wants to know everything for