First distributed in 1953, after her changeless transfer to Andalusia, her mother’s dairy domesticate, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” delineates a appreciable lot of the techniques and subjects which have been to describe the run of the mill O’Connor story. Since she was restricted by her illness to brief and uncommon outings from the homestead, O’Connor found out how to draw upon the present belongings for the subject of her tales. These belongings included the overall inhabitants round her, her perusing materials, which comprised of various books and periodicals which got here to Andalusia, and a assortment of neighborhood and native every day papers.
A few pundits have referred to as consideration to the influence of territorial and neighborhood every day paper tales on O’Connor’s fiction. The Misfit, the obsessive executioner who kills a complete household on this story, was evidently manufactured from every day paper information of two hoodlums who had threatened the Atlanta territory within the mid 1950s; Purple Sammy Butts, as indicated by one other pundit, might have been based on a neighborhood “esteemed gentleman” who had made nice and got here again to Milledgeville yearly, on the occasion of his birthday, to go to a dinner in his respect, facilitated by the close by shippers.
“A Good Man is Hard to Find” analysis exhibits that O’Connor’s therapy of the characters on this story strengthens her perspective of man as a fallen animal. Rapidly, the story portrays the devastation of an in and out excessively odd household by three received away convicts. The topical peak of the story contains a proposal of effortlessness and the grandma’s acknowledgment of that blessing due to the epiphany she encounters simply earlier than her passing. The events which immediate that peak, in any case, produce a important a part of the keenness of the story.
The peruser’s first perspective of the household is one supposed to delineate the irreverence and dispute which describe the household’s associations with one another. The grandma’s
self-importance and narcissistic frame of mind are made clear within the preliminary three traces of the story. As a substitute of submit to the household’s association for a trek to Florida, she needs to go to a portion of her “associations” in east Tennessee.
Within the following line, one discovers that Bailey is her solitary little one, a contact of information which retains a conceivable misreading of the grandma’s final pure phrases, “You’re one in every of my youngsters,” and on this method retains the peruser from lacking the exercise of magnificence towards the end of the story. In her endeavor to get the household to go to Tennessee as opposed to Florida, the grandma makes use of the information story of the received away killer, the Misfit, to try to alarm Bailey into altering his opinion. Regardless of the truth that Bailey doesn’t reply her (on this method demonstrating a whole absence of regard for her), the incidence offers an amusing hinting to the end of the story.
On the level when Bailey neglects to react to her weight, the grandma endeavors to get her little lady in-law, a boring younger girl with a face “as expansive and innocent as a cabbage,” to allow her to persuade Bailey to go to Tennessee as a substitute of Florida in gentle of the truth that the youngsters, John Wesley and June Star, haven’t but visited Tennessee. Bailey’s important different moreover disregards the supplication, but the non-vocal discourtesy of the guardians discovers voice by way of the kids. Their direct towards the grandma stresses the insolence which is regular for the entire household.
Though “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is an early work within the O’Connor ordinance, it incorporates a giant variety of the parts which come to painting the lion’s share of her brief works of fiction. The larger a part of her tales comprise a one who has a stable sentiment of self-assurance or feels that he has lived such that his direct can’t be addressed. As did the Greek tragedians, O’Connor appears to view these characters as being in a situation of hubris (a situation described by domineering satisfaction and a feeling of being previous the run of future) and considers them to be being prepared for calamity.
Consequently, in story after story, these individuals are conveyed to an emergency level of their lives, and so they see their self-assurance decimated by events, or else they encounter a snapshot of effortlessness which makes them rethink their previous lives and to see the world in one other and profound gentle. In like method, a important variety of the tales finish in viciousness since O’Connor felt that it a lot of the time took brutality to stir the useless particular person to the deficiencies of life.
References:
- A Good Man is Hard to Find Analysis – Shmoop |
- A Second of Grace in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” |
- A Good Man Is Hard to Find (brief story) |