A Good Man Is Hard To Find, Flannery O’Connor
An analysis of Flannery O’Connor’s short story, A Good Man Is Hard To Find reveals that the writer uses foreshadowing, change, irony, injustice, coincidence and the significance of relationships in the story’s characters and events to show how these factors impact personal behavior.
There’s a planned family trip to Florida. One the morning of the family trip, the grandmother leads the others in entering the car. One thing remarkable about the grandmother is that she’s is elegantly clad in her best outfit and her reason for being dressed in such an attractive is that, “In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady.” From the grandmother’s perspective, it implies that she had an intuition that at the long last, all may not end well. Another reason to prop this opinion is that later on the journey, she remembered a plantation that she’s had went to on the locality in her young hood and she remembered this when she was in the place called “Toombsboro” and a house with “six white columns…and two little wooden trellis arbors.” The word has a hint of the word “tomb”, and the “two little wooden” was the two children in the family car. The grandmother also recalled the place “where you sat down with your suitor after a stroll in the garden.” Seeing that it reflects who they ended, “sat down with your suitor” was where one died and “after a stroll in the garden” implying after one had lived.
As they embark on their journey, they come across a plantation which has “five or six graves” which according to the grandmother, it belonged the plantation’s old family; the graves were “fenced”. Considering that the number of the graves in the graveyard was equal to the heads in the car’s enclosure and that eventually the family members died, the writer foreshadowed the characters’ deaths. This is later reflected on the grandmother’s comments about Misfit who escaped that she wouldn’t be amazed if there was an instant attack from Misfit. (Harold)Later on in the story, the grandmother’s recognition of Misfit signs the family’s death warrant. Bailey, after they convince their father to turn around the car says that it was the only occasion that they were “to stop for anything like this…one and only time.” The writer’s artistic use of shadowing thus implies that the death of the family members was preordained.
During the journey, the children reply their grandmother’s view of Tennessee and Georgia as being attractive in a reply that the grandmother views as a rude one when she compares with the children of their time,” in my time, children were more respectful”. Since the children’s replies are not intended to be rude, therefore it implies that not only is change inevitable, it also determines ones behavior.
In the story there’s injustice. The two children, Star and Wesley, begin playing guessing games on clouds after they had taken their lunchboxes. Wesley brings out one cloud as having the shape of a cow and Star guesses right. However, Wesley knowingly changes his mind and instead says it’s an automobile. Thus, it leads to Star starting a fight in her bid to seek justice because “he didn’t play fair.” This implies that all people are naturally good and that when they encounter injustice or unfairness in their lives, their goodness is substituted with “badness” and therefore, that’s the reason “a good man is hard to find”.
In the story there’s coincidence. The grandmother narrates about her youthful age when there was she had a suitor called Mr. Edgar Atkins Teagarden. She describes how he would bring her watermelons with his initials embossed on them (E.A.T.). One day, there was no one at home and when a Negro boy saw the word embossed on the watermelon, he eat (James). Both coincidence and fate are purposely used by the writer; coincidence is in the suitor’s initials with and the eating (eat and E.A.T) and fate is brought by the logical act of connecting watermelon and stomach (eating). Thus, it implies that people who have undergone injustice counter injustice judgment with injustice and that’s why “a good man is hard to find.” Later on in the story, after the accident has occurred, the writer writes that Bailey was clad in “yellow sport shirt…and his face were as yellow as the shirt.” Even though the journey that occurred wasn’t Bailey’s cause (it translates to the lifetime challenges), he bore the brunt of it as “teeth were clattering”; where Bailey’s face is compared to the yellowness of his shirt, implies that people’s lives adapt to the changes that they encounter in life.
In the hotel setting, Red Sam’s wife tells Star whether should want to be her “little daughter.” However, Star retorts that she wouldn’t even for “a million bucks.” The explicit thing about the Red Sam’s wife’s reply to Star’s is that the wife perceive nothing of the rudeness reply of the girl; the wife still repeats again,” Ain’t she cute.” On the contrary, the grandmother is angry about Star’s reply. The fact that the grandmother takes it seriously while the wife took it easy (considering even Star’s mother took nothing negative of the situation) implies that it’s the grandmother who hasn’t changed and she’s still old-fashioned (S.V. James). The grandmother’s conclusion in the conversation that “people…not nice like they used to be,” means that good people are there but she can find them from the high standards that she expects them to be like. Thus, she is still stuck in the past.
The inevitability of change is echoed in Red Sam’s words when “you could go off and leave your screen door unlatched” and after change,” Not no more.”
Irony is reflected when she convinces the family to turn around the car and go to the house in the old plantation. Despite the fact that later she realized that she was wrong since the house that she “vividly” knew where it was, was indeed in Tennessee and not in Georgia, “she recalled exactly which road to turn off and get to it.” The grandmother calls The Misfit and a good man, yet she says that a good man is hard to find. When the first batch was being killed in the woods, The Misfit said that after they had buried their clothes and that they had to borrow from some encountered people. Considering the conduct of The Misfit and his men, borrowing meant robbing. Again towards the end of the story, irony is displayed when the lady tries to buy her life using “all the money I’ve got” while she has none.
Injustice is again displayed when, The Misfit denies ever doing anything wrong, after The Misfit purportedly said died of flu and that he wasn’t involved in his death whatsoever but he was jailed anyway, because “they had the papers.” In conclusion, the immediate environment and what a person goes through greatly determines the behavior demonstrated.
Works cited
Harold, Bloom. Truman Capote. New York: Infobase Publishing , 2009.
James, Mellard M. Four modes; a rhetoric of modern fiction. New York: Pennsylania State University, 1973.
James, Schall V. Another sort of learning. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988.