“A Good Man Is Hard to Find” 839Christian values, as the reader can see as the story
follows her conversations and inner convictions.
She is not consumed by Christ in the way that the
Misfit knows a true follower would be. In fact, the
grandmother is most willing to compromise Christ’s
power when she sees this as a chance to save her
life, claiming that perhaps he did not raise the dead
after all. Ironically, at the very moment at which the
grandmother is transformed and experiences the
life-altering grace of Christ, embracing the mur-
derer of her family as her son, the Misfit shoots her
because he cannot handle the affection she directs at
him, and because he does not desire grace in his life.
“A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is a story
about goodness in humans, which, as O’Connor
shows, is nonexistent apart from Christ. When the
Misfit proclaims in the end that the grandmother
“would of been a good woman . . . if it had been
somebody there to shoot her every minute of her
life,” he ultimately points to Christ’s death on the
cross, an outside force that made the grandmother
change. Through the character of the Misfit, who
so freely admits his own guilt in light of Christ’s
innocence, O’Connor points to a universal need for
grace. She puts words of wisdom into his mouth as
he proclaims that if Jesus is indeed who he says he
is, the only proper human response is worship and
abandonment of the self. If Jesus does not exist,
human evil is justified, as it remains without eternal
consequences.
Wiebke Omnus
vIoLence in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”
Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to
Find” anticipates the family’s violent death at the
hands of the Misfit from the very first paragraph
of the short story. The grandmother’s initial fears,
expressed as an attempt to manipulate her family
to alter their travel plans and make east Tennessee
rather than Florida the destination of their trip, are
not taken seriously. Yet they are dreadfully fulfilled
in the short story’s conclusion, as the entire family
is shot by the Misfit and his accomplices. O’Connor
mingles violence and humor to a specific purpose,
and she manages to affect her readers perhaps even
more powerfully by not going into minute descrip-
tions of bloody scenes. Ultimately, she points to the
violence on the cross of Christ through the events
portrayed in the story.
“A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is an extremely
violent story, but it is also outrageously funny. The
combination of violence and humor is typical of
O’Connor’s fiction as she attempts to shock her
reader, hoping to create a critical distance that will
cause him or her to consider the larger point of her
story. In “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” she shapes
her characters and portrays the dynamic between
them with great care, crafting intricate details to
create situations that are both funny and shock-
ing. For example, Bailey, the son with whom the
grandmother lives, is wearing “a yellow sport shirt
with bright blue parrots designed in it,” and after
the car accident, which the grandmother causes, the
narrator comments that Bailey’s “face was as yellow
as the shirt.” As he is being taken away to be killed,
Bailey’s “eyes were as blue and intense as the parrots
in his shirt.” The grandmother offers the Misfit one
of her son’s shirts immediately preceding the shot
that kills him, and the Misfit ends up putting on
the parrot shirt Bailey was wearing after having shot
him, which the grandmother is too traumatized to
acknowledge. Thus, O’Connor pokes fun at Bailey’s
fashion taste immediately before his execution and
then dresses the murderer in the victim’s shirt, trans-
ferring the grandmother’s motherly affections from
Bailey to the Misfit; readers do not know whether
to laugh or to be horrified, being forced to carefully
evaluate the cause of their emotions.
Violence is presented very subtly and in a man-
ner that is far removed from the actual violent event.
Avoiding gory scenes or even the mere mention
of bloodshed, O’Connor works with suggestions
rather than descriptions. Thus, the aforementioned
parrot shirt, alongside two pistol shots, serves as an
indicator for Bailey’s death. It is left to the reader’s
imagination to picture what happened in the woods,
which increases the intensity of the reading experi-
ence and causes the reader to focus on the meaning
of the events as opposed to paying attention only to
the details themselves.
Violence and the concept of grace are closely
linked in this story. It is in the face of violence that
the grandmother, whom O’Connor has taken great
care to portray as rather unlikable and judgmental,