O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard

Foreshadowing is a literary technique used by many authors to provide the reader with a glimpse of future events that will transpire within the work, thereby hooking the reader into the story and retaining the reader’s full attention. Flannery O’Connor, in her short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” brilliantly utilized vivid imagery and twisted irony to foreshadow the fate of the entire family. The gruesome ending to this story is, perhaps, the reason O’Connor placed such great emphasis on foreshadowing. “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is pregnant with religious symbols and metaphors, and fearing that leaving out such violence to protect the squeamish would alter the message of grace and redemption that she was trying to convey, she opted to gradually set the reader up for it by placing clues of the family’s demise throughout the work. From the beginning of the story, the reader has a useful idea as to what to expect as the story progresses. By implementing the foreshadowing technique, O’Connor has not only gained the reader’s interest, she has also provided the reader with insight to the ending so that, shocki

As the story progresses, the family is well on their way to Florida when they pass by a cotton field that has “five or six graves fenced in the middle of it” (474). The reader instantly reconciles the number of graves to the number of family members. The grandmother, Bailey, his wife, June Star (the little girl), John Wesley (the little boy), and the baby make up five or six people, depending on how you view the baby. This vivid image of the graveyard is not an accident. O’Connor is clearly warning the reader that a terrible fate awaits the entire family. Extraordinarily, O’Connor goes on to give the reader more insight as to what will happen in the future when the grandmother says, “Look at the graveyard…that was the old family burying ground. That belonged to the plantation” (474). O’Connor’s mention of a family burying ground belonging to a plantation is a foreshadowing as to how the story will later develop.

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