Symbolism In A Good Man Is Hard To Find

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Jason Patton Donna White Comp II 9-25-15 Readers Response In the short story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" by Flannary O'Connor, there are many literary elements that can be used to break down the short story. The use of symbolism, themes, and motifs really tell the tale of this short story. The use of symbolism in this short story is hard to pick out in certain parts but the biggest use of symbolism is when the grandmother dresses up as a lady when the family leaves to go on the trip. All the grandmother cared about was looking like a lady if she died in a car accident. O’Connor wrote, “…anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was lady.”(423). The grandmother doing so she was foreshadowing that she knew that the family was going to get into a motor vehicle accident. The…show more content…
Being the good Christian folk they are, it would be normal for the family to think that they are recipients of grace. The family believes that through God’s grace you will find salvation, and that he gives out blessings and grace freely to anyone who wants it. The Grandmother is the most unlikely one of the family to receive grace because she is mean to the children, lies to them, makes them do what she wants them to do even though the children do not want to do it, and manipulates them. The Grandmother has not a care in the world about the people or the world around her, she only cares about herself. She sees herself as everyone else’s superior, such as when O’Connor writes, “’Oh look at the cute little Pickaninny!’ she said and pointed to a Negro child standing in the door of a shack.”(424). From this quote we can see that the grandmother sees herself as a high ranking lady in the South. If the grandmother would have seen the world around her with an open eye then things more than likely would have been more prosperous than her whole family being
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