Flannery O Connor's Penchant For The Southern Grotesque

Flannery O’Connor’s penchant for the Southern grotesque plays out clearly in her short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find”. This narrative, featuring a grandmother who is killed by escaped convicts succeeds largely due to the interplay among its separate narrative parts. By combining a discriminate morality, a “holier than thou” attitude, and the delusion of grace in the territory of the devil O’Connor is able to highlight a universal and timeless theme found throughout her works: A smug and sanctimonious mindset will bring about punitive measures, however not without a chance of redemption. The protagonist of the story (the grandmother) showed a sense of smugness and moral superiority to her own family in the very first paragraph. When discussing …show more content…
The name of the story itself is “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, and throughout it the Grandmother uses the term several times. The most notable time is when the Family has stopped at “Red Sammy’s Famous Barbecue” and is having lunch. During this instance the proprietor (Red Sammy) sits down and instigates a conversation with the Grandmother; Red Sammy recalls that “Two fellers came in here last week and in an old beat up car...I let them fellers charge the gas they bought. Now why did I do that?” to this the Grandmother replies immediately “Because you’re a good man.” It is interesting to note that previous to the aforementioned exchange Red Sammy says “You can’t win, these days you just don’t know who to trust.”, this implies nostalgia which the Grandmother had also expressed several times previously in the story, stating that things “today” weren’t as good as they were in the past. What this implies is that the Grandmother doesn’t use the same definition of good that others use, the phrase “ a good man” for the Grandmother denotes someone who has values and opinions that intersect with or are aligned with her own. In this case, she calls Red Sammy a good man because he followed two of her values the first is that he is nostalgic about times past, when they both felt as though everything was better the second is when he confides in her about blindly trusting others which is related to what …show more content…
It is reasonable to assume that the “grace” mentioned here is alluding to divine grace, considering the author’s background and devout Christian faith. In said case the grace commonly referred to in Christian theology is that God can bestow that grace upon anybody, no matter how unlikely the recipient. In the case of A Good Man is Hard to Find, the recipient is the Grandmother, who is very unlikely to achieve it. She walks around with a smug attitude, trailing behind her a self-satisfied air, she thinks that the status of her birth makes her better than everybody else (“Another instance in which a possible higher moral standing is shown is when she is talking to the Misfit. She continues to say to him “you’re a good man. I can tell you don’t have an ounce of common blood in you.”) Throughout the story (and it is implied her entire life) she lies to her family, often manipulating her son (“… I couldn’t answer to my conscious if I did”) and harps to everyone about how the past in which she grew up was much better; it’s very easy to see that her entire family resents her. However, when the Misfit arrives after the car crash, one can see her ego begin to crumble as the conversation goes on and her family is executed. The Grandmother’s attitude goes from smug to speechless, beginning with her trying to reason with the Misfit, (“You wouldn’t shoot a lady would you?”) to her just repeating