Sunday, April 14, 2013

A Good Man Is Hard To Find

This story by Flannery O'Connor seems to be about a fairly normal family. This little old grandmother is very paranoid and reads in the newspaper that there is a serial killer on the loose in Florida, and the family wants to road trip there. So, grandmother insists that they go to Tennessee instead because "I couldn't answer to my conscience" she said if her family were to run into this murderer. I believe that this is the only time when the grandmother actually makes a good decision from her first instinct because every decision she makes after that in the story steers them literally into a tree.. During their drive, they actually pass a cemetery that grandmother says is the family's ancestors. This foreshadows the death of the entire family at the end, I think. Of course Grandma is the one to literally flag down the hearse full of murderers! I think this story is religious in some ways, and that it kind of says that everyone is doomed and has sinned; therefore, we will all have our day of reckoning and punishment. The entire family is killed, though there is no mention of what happens to the baby. The most interesting line in this short story: "She would of been a good woman... if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." is ironic because the Misfit is saying that the grandmother would have been a good woman if she was in the midst of death and had a change of heart and was super nice because she was begging for her life. It is ironic because it seemed that out of the whole family, the grandmother was the one who lived by God and tried to teach the children about peace rather than conflict and was really a good woman.

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