A Good Man Is Hard To Find Literary Analysis

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Kristine Valencia S. Farrier LI 150 September 2014 A Good Man is Hard to Find: Analysis “People are certainly not nice like they used to be” (205). Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is a short story that expresses an idea of what constitutes as a good man. The story flows from a family wanting to take a vacation to an abrupt plot twist of the family ending up murdered. Although the narrator is limited to one character’s thoughts and feelings, this short fiction is focused on two characters: the Grandmother and the Misfit. It is apparent that their personalities differ from one another, but they share one thing in common: the need to achieve some level of God’s Grace. O’Conner writes the story in a way that suggests that not everyone is a…show more content…
O’Connor’s short story contains such dark humor. The Misfit was introduced in the first paragraph of the story: “…this fellow that calls himself The Misfit is aloose…” (607). It appears to have no significance in the beginning, but in the end readers know it was not a coincidence. As if by fate, the family comes across him. The family also passes a cotton field with “five or six graves fenced in the middle of it” (207). This could be argued as a foreshadow technique O’Connor used to suggest an impending death. The irony is how the family just wanted a nice family vacation but ended up being murdered. O’Connor also uses verbal irony: the Grandmother says that she “wouldn’t take [her] children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it” (207). The grandmother, in fact, was probably
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