Turpin Vs Grandmother

Flannery O'Connor is an author who consistently implements deeeper meaning into her main characters. Take for example, the grandmother featured in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” At first, she appe ars as simply a crotchety, old, manipurlative woman, but upon further research, her demeannor appears to go back to the way she was raised and her highly religiouus roots. Similarly, the character of Mrs. Turpin is very much along the same lines. However similar they may appear, they are, in fact, equally as different. The two characters, Mrs. Turpin and the grandmother are in fact almost scarily similar. Both are wildly dismissive, arrogant, self centered, manipulative, and judgemental. They seem to have very similar states of mind altogether. …show more content…
In the case of the grandmother, her manipulations result in a less than happy ending for her entire family. As she travels with her family, creating chaos in order to satisfy herself, she ends up getting her family in some very deep trouble. They get captured by a man known as “the misfit” who begins dragging her family members off and killing them. Even as this is happening, the grandmother still chooses to act only in her self interest and beg for her own life. In her final moments, she was not spared and learned her lesson in a way that proved highly permanent. FOr her, there was no character development at all. She began a bitter old woman, and died that way, never having seen the error of her …show more content…
Turpin was plaiued with similar character traits, but was not destined to meet the same fate. While she was still a manipulative nd selfish person, she was given another gift. She had a sort of vision that revealed to her the error of heer ways. It showed her that all are equal in the eyes of God and that her vile judgements werre unnecessary and harmful to both her and those around her. With that, she was given the opportunity to change and becom e better because of it. Unlike the grandmother, she was essentically given a second chance. A second chance to mend her ways and see the light. Now, in both cases, they share a single theme. The idea that ignorance is an awful trait to have. However, one story clearly displays this theme far better then the other. In “A good man is hard to find,” the grandmother spends the entire story in her ignorant state, but never learns anything from it. At the moment she should learn the error of her ways, she gets herself killed, and therefore doesn’t become better for it. As an audince, you don’t learn that there is any hope from changing. Her story is quite franly bad at demostrating this