Interpretive Analysis On “A Good Man Is Hard To Find“

Interpretive Analysis On “A Good Man Is Hard To Find
“In Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find� we get a portrait of a 1950s postwar family who, in the midst of their own naivety, find themselves not only on the road from Atlanta, Georgia to Florida but on the road to the their own demise. The most outstanding character in this story is the grandmother, and since the story is told from the third person omniscient view, it will be easy for us to analyze the grandmother’s character. She connects the other characters together throughout the story with her own selfishness and stupidity, and through a self-realization which becomes the most important moment in the story.
As the story opens, the scene is set in the home of a man named Bailey and his family which consists of his mother (the grandmother), his wife and their two children-June Star and John Wesley. Bailey is planning a trip to Florida, but the grandmother would rather go to Tennessee. We see the first sign of the grandmother’s selfishness here when she tries to convince her son, Bailey, to take the family to Tennessee. She does her persuasion through a newspaper article which says that a convict called The Misfit has escaped from the Federal

While the family is on the road to from Atlanta to Florida, the scene changes to a filling station and dance hall called The Tower. While the family is eating Red Sammy’s barbecue sandwiches, the grandmother carries on a very foreshadowing conversation with Red Sam. “These days you don’t know who to trust,” he said. “Ain’t that the truth?”… “A good man is hard to find.” If the grandmother knows this and makes these assertions, then why does she so naïve and quick to trust The Misfit later in the story? She is superficial in her beliefs which give her a complex but fake persona.

eral Penitentiary in Florida. She says, “I wouldn’t take my children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it. I couldn’t answer to my conscious if I did.” We will see how this statement becomes the epitome of irony in the next few paragraphs.

This story is about trust. This story teaches us that trust is to be built and not assumed. Also, the story has a “mean what you say and say what you mean” sense about it. “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” means exactly what it says. It all came down to the grandmother putting all her trust in The Misfit, assuming that he was a good man. We find that for our words to mean something, they cannot be just flung out of our mouths to anyone we meet. They are to be used cautiously and with prudence. The grandmother ultimately learned this lesson in the end.

As the grandmother waved the hearse-like automobile closer, she waved death closer as well. It seems that the grandmother is always getting the family into all the fixes because of her stupidity and selfishness. These two attributes come from the fact that she has not realized that life does not revolve around her, nor does it alwa