English Final Exam A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O' Connor

Theme of Punishment and Forgiveness

A fundamental question in Flannery O'Connor's Christian worldview is the problem of evil: why do bad things happen to good people, and vice versa? O'Connor clearly presents a world in which unjust or at least seemingly-unjust punishment is the norm. The Misfit is unable to remember what he was even first put in prison for—it may have been an unjust punishment, for all we know. The Grandmother, for her own part, ends up causing the death of her entirely family simply by mentioning that she recognizes the Misfit. Earlier in the conversation he claimed the only reasonable thing to do in an absurd world was to enjoy one's days causing violence and mayhem, but after The Grandmother reaches out and insists that he still must be a good person, The Misfit chastises his henchman for suggesting that there was "pleasure" in the murders. The Misfit has, in the smallest way, been changed by the redemptive power of her forgiveness. Each character suffers beyond what they may "deserve," but that does not rob forgiveness of its value and power.

The Mother

The mother is never named. For most of the story, she goes along with whatever the rest of the family is doing.

John Wesley

He is rude and vocal about his opinions, and treats the Grandmother with none of the respect she feels she deserves.

Symbol of The Misfit's Car

Misfit's car is a clear symbol for death when it enters the family's story of petty conflicts. A hearse, a type of car that carries a coffin to a funeral, is an unambiguous indication that the idea of death has arrived—for both the family and in the mind of the reader. Sure enough, it turns out that the car's passengers—the Misfit, Bobby Lee, and Hiram—are killers, and they end up murdering Bailey's entire family. The hearse-like car thus also symbolizes that the Misfit and his henchmen are carrying a history of violence and death with them.

Red Sammy Butts

Red Sammy is a good man according to the grandmother, trusting and even gullible to a fault. Red Sammy Butts, whose name we first see on billboards along the highway. He advertises himself as a veteran with a "happy smile." Red Sammy Butts is quick to participate in easy nostalgia for a romanticized past, although we also sense that he uses this kind of talk as a part of his sales pitch, and is in fact more callous and greedy than he likes to appear.

June Star

An obnoxious young girl. June Star loudly speaks her mind and makes cutting observations about those around her. She is loudmouthed and critical. When Red Sam's wife teasingly asks her to come live with them, June Star says that she wouldn't live in their home in a million years. As adorable as adults seem to find her, she treats them meanly and without respect.

Bobby Lee

At the story's end, after the Misfit has killed the Grandmother, Bobby Lee exclaims, "Some fun!" and the Misfit chastises him for taking pleasure in the killings.

Theme of Violence and Grace

At the story's end, the Misfit says of the Grandmother, "She would of been a good woman . . . if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." Flannery O'Connor may not necessarily believe that being exposed to violence makes us better people, but the message is clear: violence changes us. Up until the very end, each member of the family, most of all the Grandmother, acts almost exclusively out of self-interest. They do not consider questions of right and wrong, religion and grace, or even how to take into account the needs of others. They simply act on their petty instincts without much reflection or moral thought. But when she is subject to violence and forced to confront her own impending death, The Grandmother is suddenly capable of a more authentic and spiritual experience. When she is faced with her own mortality she encounters an unexpected moment of "grace"—she feels as if the Misfit were her own son, and reaches out, physically, hoping to save or comfort him. "Grace" signifies a moment of beauty and truth that is divine in nature—an epiphany that can pierce through the harshness or pettiness of life. In the end, however, the Grandmother's "moment of grace" only results in her death. Grace does not come easily. Instead, it is often accompanied by suffering, violence, and death. For someone like the Grandmother, who is so caught up in her own self-interest—someone so insensitive to real life—only the harsh awakening delivered by violence can cause her to open her eyes and experience something on a different, more spiritual plane.

Theme of Familial Conflict and Familial Love

Only at the story's end do we get the slightest hint of familial love. Not only does the Grandmother shout "Bailey Boy! Bailey Boy!" as the only real affectionate moment inside her family, but she then goes on to refer to the Misfit as her own son. These moments of familial love, arriving only when the Grandmother faces death, appear in stark contrast to the rest of the story, which is filled with family members ignoring each other, arguing, and acting selfishly. Not only is there constant conflict between the family members and their individual wishes, but this conflict is almost never acknowledged. Instead, the family members mostly ignore and mock one another. Ultimately, it takes the arrival of violence to get any members of the family to display their actual love for each other. When Bailey is taken off to the forest, Bailey's wife cries out. As violence can bring moments of grace, it can also bring familial love out from beneath everyday arguments and conflict.

Motif of Nostalgia

The grandmother, Red Sammy, and the Misfit's nostalgia for the past suggests that they all believe that a "good man" was easier to come by long ago and that pursuing goodness in the present day is difficult and even pointless. Red Sammy and the grandmother reminisce about the past, when people could be trusted. Red Sammy says outright that "a good man is hard to find," considering himself, gullible and foolish, to be one of this dying breed. Even the Misfit remembers things his father said and did as well as the unfairness of his punishment for crimes that he can't remember committing. According to the characters, the present is rife with ambiguity and unhappiness, and things were much different long ago. In a way, this belief allows them to stop short of deeply exploring their own potential for goodness because they've convinced themselves that the world is not conducive to it.

Symbol of The Grandmother's Hat

The Grandmother, in stark contrast to her family's more casual dress, wears a fancy hat on their trip, confident that, if she ends up killed in a car accident, she will be found looking like a proper lady. Her concern for how she will be perceived after death shows that she is concerned with the appearance of respectability more than the reality of being moral or "respectable." The Grandmother's hat also makes it clear that she does not truly embrace the finality of dying. The Grandmother buys into a more conventional view of mortality—focusing on appearances and not thinking too closely about the reality of death. It is no coincidence that the Grandmother's hat is then destroyed when the family does get into a car accident. For all of the Grandmother's attempts to prepare for a respectable death, she cannot control her fate once the harsh chaos of life interrupts her narrow world.

The Misfit

The Misfit seems an unlikely source to look to for spiritual or moral guidance, but he demonstrates a deep conviction that the other characters lack. The Misfit seriously questions the meaning of life and his role in it. He has carefully considered his actions in life and examined his experiences to find lessons within them. Because the Misfit has questioned himself and his life so closely, he reveals a self-awareness that the grandmother lacks. He knows he isn't a great man, but he also knows that there are others worse than him. The Misfit's philosophies may be depraved, but they are consistent. Unlike the grandmother, whose moral code falls apart the moment it's challenged, the Misfit has a steady view of life and acts according to what he believes is right. His beliefs and actions are not moral in the conventional sense, but they are strong and consistent and therefore give him a strength of conviction that the grandmother lacks. Twisted as it might be, he can rely on his moral code to guide his actions. The grandmother cannot, and in the last moments of her life, she recognizes his strength and her weaknesses.

Theme of Goodness

The characters of "A Good Man is Hard to Find" live by a variety of moral codes. the Grandmother's conversation with Red Sam bring up the idea of goodness, and what makes a "good man." The Grandmother seems to believe that being a good person means being honest, respectful, and polite. She tells Red Sam that he is a "good man," even though all she has seen of him is that he puts on a show of friendliness and easy nostalgia in order to help his business. She blames, somehow, Europe for her own country's decay, and criticizes Europeans for spending too much. Her sense of goodness is so based on traditional morals that, even in the face of cold-blooded murder, she thinks that her old age and "respectability" will prevent the Misfit from harming her. O'Connor does not attempt to answer what true "goodness" is, but rather adds complexity to the question itself. By presenting different and even ironic models of a "good person"—the Grandmother, Bailey, Red Sammy—she makes the reader feel the difficulty of the question, and the ambiguity of morality itself. She brings in the Misfit, whose very existence threatens the validity of any kind of objective "goodness." O'Connor's purpose is not to answer such questions, but to dissolve them: to make us more aware of how verbalized concepts and platitudes cannot touch the true mysteries of existence.

Bailey

The frazzled head of the family. Bailey seems to love his mother, but her needling behavior sometimes gets the best of him. He tries to quiet the grandmother and stop her from provoking the three criminals, but he is ineffective. The patriarch of the story's central family. Despite the constant distractions from his mother and children, he simply wants to go on a trip to Florida as planned. He is reluctant to take a detour to visit the house that the Grandmother remembers, and only gives in to stop being harassed by his children. Bailey seems to be a weary and irritable figure, worn down by the constant conflict in his family—particularly his mother's self-righteous nagging and his children's insolence.

Theme of Moral Decay

The story's title itself refers to the apparent moral decline witnessed by the Grandmother and others. There was a time, the Grandmother believes, when it was not so difficult to find good men, though we might wonder if that was ever actually true. To the Grandmother, though, the story's action supports this belief. When stranded after a car crash, the family is not tended to by friendly neighbors, but by a killer and his henchmen. Throughout the story there is a tension between this modern nihilism and a more traditional sense of morality. The Grandmother has to prevent her grandchildren from throwing their trash out the car window, and she chastises them constantly. And, even with a gun practically in her face, she yearns for and insists upon the existence of good, old-fashioned morals and respect. It is as if she cannot even acknowledge that a different kind of morality, or absence of morality, exists in the world. The Misfit comes to almost personify this nihilism that the Grandmother so fears. He not only disobeys conventional morals, but views himself as completely outside of them. The Misfit claims to not only accept the immorality of his crimes, but to forget his crimes entirely. Thus he is outside the scope of an old-fashioned view of right and wrong. The Grandmother and Red Sam Butts may cling to a conventional view of an objective morality, but the Misfit simply does not. In his own view, The Misfit is not actually "immoral." He simply acts how he chooses, without regard for (what he perceives as) the Grandmother's imagined morals. Ultimately, this apathy toward social conventions and morals is what makes him a true "misfit," someone who in their own eyes is not a villain, but simply refuses to go along with what everyone else believes is right.

The Grandmother

The unnamed grandmother considers herself morally superior to others by virtue of her being a "lady," and she freely and frequently passes judgement on others. She claims that her conscience is a guiding force in her life, such as when she tells Bailey that her conscience would not allow her to take the children in the same direction as the Misfit. She also takes any oppurtunity to judge the lack of goodness in people in the world today. She proudly wears her carefully selected dress and hat, certain that being a lady is the most important virtue of all. When the Misfit systemically murders the family, the grandmother never once begs him to spare her children or grandchildren. She does, however, plead for her own life because she cannot imagine the Misfit wanting to kill a lady. Only when the grandmother is facing death, in her final moments alone with the Misfit, does she understand where she has gone wrong in her life. Instead of being superior, she realizes she is flawed like everyone else. When she tells the Misift that he is one of her own children. she is howing that she has found the ability to see other with compassion and understanding. This is a moment of realization, one that is immediately followed by her death.