“A Good Man is Hard to Find”
In Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” O’Connor uses a gruesome and violent situation to reveal the true nature of her characters. In some cases, the natures of her characters are duplicitous to their initial descriptions in the first half of the story and in others, they stray very little from what is understood of them in the beginning. It can be argued that “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is duplicitous in its own right, beginning with a comical look at a manipulative, meddling grandmother and her family on what at first seems like a light-hearted story of a family road trip but that transitions into a horrific and deadly last scene (Stephens 360). At any rate, the Grandmother, Bailey and his wife, and even the Misfit are not thoroughly characterized until confronted with the last violent situation of the story. As O’Connor has stated before, “It is the extreme situation that best reveals what we are essentially” (“On Her Own......
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Approximate Word Count: 2080
Approximate Pages: 8 (260 words per double-spaced page) |