The plots in both “The Man Who Knew Belle Starr” and “A Good Man is Hard to Find” are driven more by chance, coincidence and irony than by character. From chance encounters to ironic deaths, each story bounces from one irony and coincidence to the next, until it is clear that their authors started with the seed of these coincidental events, and then grew their stories around them. In “The Man Who Knew Belle Starr” the protagonist Mcrae has a chance meeting with a young girl that goes by the name Belle Starr. Unbeknownst to him when he first meets her, she will be the cause of his untimely demise as the shawl she was wearing was concealing a pistol. Mcrae seems predestined to this fate. As Mcrae’s father points out, his son was always getting into trouble: “Don’t look at me boy, you got yourself into it. Getting into trouble, stealing and running around.” So when Mcrae happens upon Belle Starr, a highway hitchhiker, and decides to give her a ride, what was supposed to be a kind gesture is transformed by fate into a regrettable mistake as Belle Starr took Mcrae as hostage.
“A Good Man is Hard to Find” is similarly built on coincidences. The grandmother tries to convince her son, Bailey, to go to Tennessee …show more content…
At one point she wears a straw hat with white violets on it, a dress with matching colors, the collars and cuffs made from the sheerest and crispest cotton. She even pins a sachet along her neckline. This was all meticulously done at the precarious event “anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once she was a lady.” Coincidentally, she ends up dying that very day. In “The Man Who Knew Belle Starr” Mcrae almost gets away from Belle Starr but is stopped in his tracks because sudden misfortune when “something went wrong in his leg, something sent him sprawling…” In a cruel twist of fate, at the exact moment he was able to get away and make a run for it, his legs give
“A Good Man is Hard to Find” is similarly built on coincidences. The grandmother tries to convince her son, Bailey, to go to Tennessee …show more content…
At one point she wears a straw hat with white violets on it, a dress with matching colors, the collars and cuffs made from the sheerest and crispest cotton. She even pins a sachet along her neckline. This was all meticulously done at the precarious event “anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once she was a lady.” Coincidentally, she ends up dying that very day. In “The Man Who Knew Belle Starr” Mcrae almost gets away from Belle Starr but is stopped in his tracks because sudden misfortune when “something went wrong in his leg, something sent him sprawling…” In a cruel twist of fate, at the exact moment he was able to get away and make a run for it, his legs give