Short Story 'A Good Man Is Hard To Find'

Words: 984
Pages: 4
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Austin Kubin
Professor Mary Cook
Composition 1302.22
21 September 2016
Goodness is in the Eyes of the Beholder
What really is a good man? Does society even know what is good, or is good just a personal-assessment people make about others based on their own morals and upbringing? In the short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” Flannery O’Connor makes it apparent that good has a different meaning to different people. O’Connor suffered from lupus, a disease where the immune system can no longer tell between good and bad cells, which could be a projection of her herself in the way good is skewed throughout the story. But on the surface, the short story is about a dysfunctional family going on a road trip with the main character, the grandmother, …show more content…
He is very logical in his thinking and he has had plenty of time to interpret the kind of person he is. This makes his sense of character, when looking inside himself, the closest meaning to the word found in the story. After the grandmother kept insisting that The Misfit was a good man he objected with, “I ain’t a good man…. but I ain’t the worst in the world either.” This is a very thoughtful and grounded view on morality. It illustrates that he understands a more current definition of goodness than when compared to the grandmother’s view. This statement also symbolizes a shift in the conversation and gives an example of foreshadowing by the author for the death of the grandmother. It’s a very subtle foreshadow because you have to look back her core belief. That belief is that she is a lady and that protects her. It protects her in the sense that a good man would not harm a lady. But since he is not, she will likely not be protected by her lady-ness. Thus when The Misfit looks into himself, his view on goodness is the closest to societies …show more content…
Throughout the story the author indicates that the grandmother has an incredible talent for manipulating others. When she is pleading for life saying, “you wouldn’t shoot a lady, would you?”, “I just know you’re a good man”, “maybe they put you in by mistake”, “if you would pray, Jesus would help you”, and “maybe He didn’t raise the dead” are all her just trying to manipulate The Misfit. Up until the very end, before getting shot, she was just grasping at straws trying to save her own skin and changing The Misfit’s perception of good. The author even went further by stating that when the grandmother reached out to The Misfit, in a last ditch effort to manipulate him to spare her, that he “sprang back as if a snake had bitten him.” The use of the snake was the author symbolizing either Satan or sins. Thus the grandmother actually wasn’t a good person in the end, and now changed the view on goodness for The Misfit.
Though people can perceive many themes in “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, one prevalent throughout is goodness and its malleability. Through the manipulation of a what it means to be a good man by the grandmother, and the critical thinking of The Misfit, we find that goodness has a different interpretation throughout the minds and eyes of others. If everyone tries to understand
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