Evil In A Good Man Is Hard To Find

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Evil can often be seen in plain sight, but it can just as easily be hidden. Religion, however, can almost never be hidden due to evangelization. The combination of the two is rarely seen unless religion is used as a cover for evil. In Flannery O’Connor’s short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” the Grandmother, a nontraditional antagonist, exemplifies the combination of religion and evil, but she only sees herself as religious when truly she is only evil. However, the misfit, a conventional antagonist, knows he is evil and embraces it. In the short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” Flannery O’Connor parallels nontraditional evil with conventional evil to illustrate that evil can be found in anyone, even your grandmother. The grandmother …show more content…
Brandy proclaims, “It is not easy to say who is the more evil, the Misfit or the Grandmother, and indeed that is the point.” (par. 11). However, the Misfit is obviously more evil, because he is fully aware of his sinister actions. The grandmother is still evil, but at least she is not being evil for the sake of being evil. The Misfits overpowering evil leads Renner to believe, “it is enough to make the grandmother the heroine of the story” but that fact that one character is less evil than the other does not automatically make them the hero of the story. Yet Renner makes a case for the grandmother during the end of the story exclaiming, “his real suffering touches her almost instinctive springs of sympathy and human kinship” (par. 22). The grandmother is not actually touched or has any real feelings sympathy. These emotions are tactics used by the grandmother to manipulate the Misfit into changing his mind about her fate. These emotions are not a sign of change in the grandmother because all she is doing is reverting to her manipulative ways. Brandy also falls into the grandmother’s manipulative trap exclaiming, “the Grandmother shall be the Misfit's savior” (par. 7). Although, the Misfit does not have a change of heart, therefore the Grandmother cannot be his savior because he is never saved. The only person the …show more content…
O’Connor stated, "Her backwoods preachers, she believed, came closer to understanding the human condition in relationship to God than any number of psychologists, teachers, and sociologists, none of whom ever appear very flatteringly in her fiction." (Garbett par. 22). The psychologists, teachers, and sociologists are represented by the Grandmother in “A Good Man is Hard to Find” because she has a distaste for the backwoods and has a poor understanding of the human condition. O’Connor cautions readers not to be like the Grandmother, even though she is the less evil of the two antagonists, because the Grandmother is a more realistic type of evil that many people can easily fall into without even being aware of it. Judging and manipulating others are easy tasks and sins that humans often commit; killing is a sin most humans do not commit. O’Connor pairs the most extreme sin with two lesser sins to warn readers that just because you do not kill people does not mean that you are not evil. In fact, in the short story, the lesser of the two evils is killed to further prove O’Connor’s
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