“A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor shows a family vacation that quickly turns into a violent end by a criminal known as “the Misfit.” The author is known for her religious symbolism and the violence of life. O’Connor’s settings are most often in the American South. In fact, the story, most characters are Southerner. The central confrontation between the grandmother and The Misfit revolves around Jesus. The question is how God’s grace is involved with the Grandmother and the Misfit.
The story begins in Atlanta with the grandmother trying to persuade her family to go to Tennessee instead of Florida, where the loose criminal called the Misfit is heading to. The grandmother who appeared throughout the story is one of the major characters. …show more content…
The grandmother brings up praying to Jesus in the hope that she can beg the Misfit to spare her life by appealing to his religious sense. It turns out, however, that The Misfit has probably thought about Jesus more seriously than she has. The Misfit's doubt in Jesus leads him to think that there is no real right or wrong, and no ultimate point to life. That was the reason he changed his name: "Jesus shown everything off balance. It was the same case 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, [..] they never shown me my papers. That's why I sign myself now” (O’Connor 432). The grandmother counters this argument by saying that perhaps Christ never did raise the dead. The Misfit expresses his wish to see for himself. He claims that he wouldn’t have turned out the way he did if only he had seen actual proof of Christ's existence. At the story's climax, the grandmother appears to receive a “moment of grace” that she has lacked all her life, when she says, “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!” (O’Connor 433). The image of the grandmother lying dead “with her legs crossed under her like a child's and her face smiling up at the cloudless sky” signals the successful action of grace (O’Connor 433). At the last moment of her life, the grandmother was no longer a lady and
The story begins in Atlanta with the grandmother trying to persuade her family to go to Tennessee instead of Florida, where the loose criminal called the Misfit is heading to. The grandmother who appeared throughout the story is one of the major characters. …show more content…
The grandmother brings up praying to Jesus in the hope that she can beg the Misfit to spare her life by appealing to his religious sense. It turns out, however, that The Misfit has probably thought about Jesus more seriously than she has. The Misfit's doubt in Jesus leads him to think that there is no real right or wrong, and no ultimate point to life. That was the reason he changed his name: "Jesus shown everything off balance. It was the same case 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, [..] they never shown me my papers. That's why I sign myself now” (O’Connor 432). The grandmother counters this argument by saying that perhaps Christ never did raise the dead. The Misfit expresses his wish to see for himself. He claims that he wouldn’t have turned out the way he did if only he had seen actual proof of Christ's existence. At the story's climax, the grandmother appears to receive a “moment of grace” that she has lacked all her life, when she says, “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!” (O’Connor 433). The image of the grandmother lying dead “with her legs crossed under her like a child's and her face smiling up at the cloudless sky” signals the successful action of grace (O’Connor 433). At the last moment of her life, the grandmother was no longer a lady and