A Good Man Is Hard To Find Irony Analysis

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Flannery O’Connor had a gift for storytelling. Her stories are far from pious; in fact, their mode is usually shocking and often bizarre. The literary genre she chose was the grotesque— “grotesque with good reason,” she would claim—because “to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.” She wrote two novels and thirty-one short stories. Her short story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” reveals more clearly the dynamism of her fictional world in which unexpected events, usually the tragic, yield genuine human insight and the possibility of Redemption (May). This story has some great examples of irony. “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is one of O’Connor famous short stories. It is about a …show more content…
The grandmother “recalled an old plantation that she had visited” and “recalled exactly which road to turn off to get to it” (O’Connor). This is ironic because later on she realizes the house was in Tennessee not in Georgia. If she had told Bailey of her mistake, they could have turned and avoided the car crash. In addition, if she had not brought the cat it would not have jumped out of the basket causing the wreck.
Lastly, another example of irony is when the grandmother wants to appear as a lady by dressing in ladylike attire, so that “In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady” (O’Connor). This is ironic because at the end of the story she dies from shots to the chest. A woman who is shot does not look like a lady afterwards. Since her body is in the woods, nobody will find her for a long time. If anybody ever did find her, then her body would probably be rotten beyond recognition.
This story had many great examples of irony. My favorite part of the story was when the grandmother brought the cat, for fear it killing itself, but it ended up being the one not dying. This story also shows that people are not always who they appear to be. I loved going through the story and seeing the different types of irony. O’Connor had a gift for
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