A Good Man Is Hard to Find (short story)

"A Good Man Is Hard to Find"
The work's title was taken from the 1918 Eddie Green song that includes the lines "A good man is hard to find / You always get the other kind".[1] (1918 sheet music cover.)
Author	Flannery O'Connor
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Southern Gothic, short story, dialogue
Published in	Modern Writing I
Publication type	Short story collection
Publisher	Avon
Media type	Print
Publication date	1953

"A Good Man Is Hard to Find" is a Southern gothic short story first published in 1953 by author Flannery O'Connor who, in her own words, described it as "the story of a family of six which, on its way driving to Florida [from Georgia], gets wiped out by an escaped convict who calls himself the Misfit"."^[2]

The story remains the most anthologized and most well-known of all of O'Connor's works^[3] even with its enigmatic conclusion that involves a dialogue between a serial killer, tormented by the suffering of mankind and himself for what he considers the injustices in both secular and divine laws, and a superficial, mischievous, morally-flawed, Methodist grandmother dressed as an old fashioned Southern lady. She stumbles into a way that makes The Misfit doubt what he is doing just for the moment before he murders her, and in pity for his torments, she demonstrates in an act of mercy that all good Christian mothers, like God, love all God's children no matter what the children do.

The story is a black comedy in which a serial killer is the only character that understands why a good man is hard to find. As a moral tale with reference to the story's title that is the Eddie Green song, the work addresses infidelity in marriage and religious faith and the power of revival. It is also a moral tale about folly — an avoidable car accident and a self-righteous killer, a former undertaker that preaches apostasy, who demonstrates he knows more than "A Time for Everything", the poem that begins the Book of Ecclesiastes chapter 3, by alluding to the looming death Qoheleth said comes to all in Ecclesiastes 12:1 — "evil days come and the years draw near of which you will say, 'I have no pleasure in them'". The weary mass murderer seems to have enough sense to know he will someday be caught by the Authorities and be executed — an "eye for an eye" that seems to fit, rather than misfit, his own notion of just punishment. The man familiar with Ecclesiastes would know that his rebellion is folly being realized as prophecy written as an aphorism by its author, who claimed to be King Solomon, in Ecclesiastes 10:8:

"He who digs a pit will fall into it, and a serpent will bite him who breaks through a wall."

Publication history[]

"A Good Man Is Hard to Find" was first published in 1953 in the multi-author short story anthology Modern Writing I published by Avon.^[4][5] The story appears in her own collection of short stories A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories published in 1955 by Harcourt.^[6] In 1960, it was included in the anthology The House of Fiction, published by Charles Scribner's Sons, and later included in numerous other short story collections.

An anagogical vision for a total picture[]

"A Good Man Is Hard to Find" is an example of the author's "anagogical vision" aimed to express realities, beyond symbolism, to convey the meanings of her work. For example, the sun is more than a symbol of God, it is God as a character that is never directly seen in the dispirited world of the story. As another example, a large part of the total meaning of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" is its relationships with the New Testament story of Jesus and the Rich Young Man and the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes from dramatic, comedic, moral, and theological perspectives.

In her essay, "The Nature and Aim of Fiction", O'Conner described her goals for writing fiction. The essay is useful for helping readers understand how to approach and interpret her works. One of her major goals in writing was to construct elements of her fiction so they can be interpreted anagogically — her "anagogical vision":

"The kind of vision the fiction writer needs to have, or to develop, in order to increase the meaning of his story is called anagogical vision, and that is the kind of vision that is able to see different levels of reality in one image or one situation. The medieval commentators on Scripture found three kinds of meaning in the literal level of the sacred text: one they called allegorical, in which one fact pointed to another; one they called tropological, or moral, which had to do with what should be done; and one they called anagogical, which had to do with the Divine life and our participation in it. Although this was a method applied to exegesis, it was also an attitude toward all of creation, and a way of reading nature... ."^[7]

Peter M. Chandler, Jr., summarized O'Connor's vision for readers — that all of the interpretations of her work are rooted in its literal sense: "...[F]or O'Connor, the literal in some sense already "contains" the figurative. Far from being a level of meaning superadded to the literal sense, the 'spiritual sense' is already inherent in any attempt to render something artistically. 'A good story,' she wrote, 'is literal in the same sense a child's drawing is literal.'"^[8] In other words, O'Connor understood that her anagogical vision is a challenge to readers because they must not only understand the literal story but also associate the literal with their knowledge or experience. Consequently, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" is enriched beyond its literal narrative when the literal can be related to biblical, Christian, Roman Catholic, Protestant, Southern society and its history, and other subjects.

The literal sense of the story's title and The Misfit's complaint, "If He [Jesus] did what He said, then it's nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him" both appear in a more constructive context in the New Testament story of Jesus and the Rich Young Man suggest searches for the deeper meanings of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" might start there. At readings O'Connor offered suggestions about her intent at the literal level, such as for a 1963 reading at a Southern college with a highly respected creative writing program — Hollins College in Roanoke, Virginia:

"I don't have any pretensions to being an Aeschylus or Sophocles and providing you in this story with a cathartic experience out of your mythic background, though this story I'm going to read certainly calls up a good deal of the South's mythic background, and it should elicit from you a degree of pity and terror, even though its way of being serious is a comic one. I do think, though, that like the Greeks you should know what is going to happen in this story so that any element of suspense in it will be transferred from its surface to its interior."^[9]

Epigraph[]

An example of the effect of O'Connor's anagogical vision is an epigraph she wrote for "A Good Man Is Hard to Find". The epigraph was published only for the paperback Three by Flannery O'Connor that also included her two novels Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away, that first appeared in September 1964,^[10] a month after her death, and eleven years after the short story was first published. The epigraph was probably included in compliance with her wishes upon her death.^[11] The epigraph reads:

"'The dragon is by the side of the road, watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you. We go to the father of souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon.' — St. Cyril of Jerusalem."^[12]

The literal sense of the epigraph is the impression it has on readers unacquainted with Cyril of Jerusalem's Procatechesis from which O'Connor extracted it. As the story opens with a family's plan to drive to Florida for a vacation and is warned about a criminally-violent escaped prison convict heading in the same direction, the epigraph foreshadows the possibility of the family's encounter with life-threatening violence since going to "the father of souls" alludes to death. When the reader encounters The Misfit, the convict appears to be the figurative dragon, a symbol for evil and danger.

For readers acquainted with Procatechesis and the introduction of the boy, John Wesley, named for the Methodist theologian, the dragon represents one's own moral proclivities that can derail the baptized Christian's lifetime efforts toward achieving salvation after death. To these readers, the epigraph leaves the impression that the story is a tale about Christian characters, including The Misfit, about the moral choices made within and prior to the story's events that affect their prospect for salvation. The story only serves to focus on a highlight on a path toward salvation. With respect to St. Cyril's dragon in the tropological (moral) sense and The Misfit in the literal sense, when the reader encounters The Misfit, a gospel singer turned killer, he is a character already devoured by St. Cyril's dragon given his communications with God and rejection of Jesus as savior. The grandmother's murder is her destruction by The Misfit as a metaphorical dragon in the literal sense, but tropologically, she performs a redemptive act at her end that allows her to pass by St. Cyril's dragon. O'Connor's rewording of the item in Procatechesis can be viewed as her effort to introduce literal and tropological realities that can coexist concurrently throughout her story.

O'Connor used the epigraph to close her essay "The Fiction Writer and His Country" that was published in 1957 in the book The Living Novel: A Symposium, a book of statements by novelists on their art,^[13] where she followed the epigraph with the closing sentence: "No matter what form the dragon may take, it is of this mysterious passage past him, or his jaws, that stories of any depth will always be concerned to tell, and this being the case, it requires considerable courage at any time, in any place, not to turn away from the story teller."^[14] The statement indicates how O'Connor wanted her works read and for the reader to look for the dragon in her short story collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories that includes at least nine of its ten stories about original sin.^[15]

Plot[]

Bailey, the head of an Atlanta household, prepares to take his family on a vacation to Florida. His mother (known only as "the grandmother" throughout the story) warns Bailey that a convict called The Misfit has escaped from prison and is heading towards Florida. She suggests a trip to East Tennessee instead; a proposal Bailey ignores. Her grandson, John Wesley, comments that his grandmother could stay in Atlanta; her granddaughter, June Star, rudely says “she wouldn't stay at home to be queen for a day;” and her infant grandchild is tended to by her daughter-in-law. When they leave the next morning, the grandmother occupies the backseat of the family's car, dressed so that if she is killed in an accident, she can be recognized as a Southern "lady." She hides the family's cat, Pitty Sing, in a basket between her legs, not wanting to leave it home alone.

While traveling, the grandmother points out scenery in Georgia. Her grandchildren respond by berating both Georgia and Tennessee, and the grandmother reminds them that in her day, “children were more respectful of their native states and their parents and everything else." She delights in seeing a naked black child waving from a shack, finding the image quaint. The grandmother later sees a graveyard which was once part of a plantation that she jokingly says has "Gone with the Wind". She tells her three grandchildren that when she was a "maiden lady," she had been "courted" by a man who, as an early owner of Coca Cola stock, died wealthy.

The family stops for barbeque at The Tower Restaurant after passing a series of billboards proclaiming the restaurant and food as "famous" and the proprietor, Red Sammy Butts, as "the fat boy with the happy laugh." On arrival, the family finds that the place is somewhat rundown. Red Sammy easily charms the grandmother, but is rather scornful of his wife, a mistrustful waitress who worries about being robbed by The Misfit. The grandmother promptly declares Red Sammy "a good man," and the two reminisce about better times while lamenting the decay of values.

Later that afternoon, the family continues on in the car before the grandmother falsely remembers a plantation being in the area, only realizing her mistake after Bailey takes a turn, at her instruction, down a rocky dirt road surrounded by wilderness. The pang of this error causes her to disturb the cat, who leaps onto Bailey, who loses control of the car, and the automobile flips over into a ditch. No one is seriously hurt, but the accident is witnessed by a party of three strange men-- one of whom the grandmother recognizes as The Misfit. She announces this, and consequently, The Misfit has his men lead Bailey, the children's mother, and the children off into the woods where they are shot and killed. The grandmother confusedly pleads for her life, beseeching The Misfit to find solace by praying to Jesus Christ; who The Misfit blames for his troubles and the dismal state of the world.

Finally, upon seeing The Misfit's face twisted with despair, the grandmother, in a moment of clarity, reaches out and takes him by the shoulder, gently claiming him as "one of her babies." Just then, The Misfit shoots her to death. When his companions return, The Misfit says that the grandmother "would've been a good woman if it were someone there to shoot her every minute of her life," and seems to conclude that violence affords "no real pleasure in life."

Characters[]

Summary[]

Superficiality as a character theme[]

Flannery O'Connor said her craft involved realization of a "prophetic vision" where the "prophecy" is "a matter of seeing near things with their extensions of meaning and thus of seeing far things close up".^[16] The story's characters are one of the "near things" and one of the "far things" brought up close is the superficiality of the lives and interactions between a grandmother and her family used for humorous, dramatic, and thematic effects. Robert C. Evans observed:

"As its very title already suggests, 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find' (like much of O'Connor's fiction) is very much concerned with satirizing stale and clichéd uses of language. The characters who use clichés ... are all characters who tend to speak (and, more importantly, to think) in highly conventional and unoriginal ways. When O'Connor's characters mouth clichés ... that is a sign that they have ceased to think for themselves, if in fact they ever possessed any original thoughts to begin with."^[17]

Compared to the superficiality of the family that engages itself in comic books, television quiz shows (e.g., "Queen for a Day"), movies, and the newspaper's sport section, an original thought, often a dark truth like Red Sammy Butt's wife saying nobody on earth can be trusted "And I don't count nobody out of that, no nobody" looking at her husband, has both comic and dramatic affects on the reader. Evans noted, "A major purpose of the story will be to shake most of the characters, ... as well as O'Connor's readers, out of [a] kind of smug complacency."^[18]

God and the religious life of Bailey's household[]

Shallowness as a character theme is also reflected in the appearance of God, portrayed as the Sun in her stories.^[19] No character in the story sees the Sun directly. Sunlight casts the story's world of modern America as a superficial, spiritless place, where the only trace of the Sun is the indistinct bright glary haze of daylight that is "beautiful" on a cloudless day to the grandmother. The image is God being viewed as a pervasive bright yet obscure feeling rather than the brilliant, distinct object defined in the human mind by Christian doctrines.

Given his son's name, John Wesley, Bailey and his family likely regarded themselves as Methodists when John Wesley was born. The grandmother's shouting of "Pray!" and "Jesus!" recall the revivalist practices of Methodism that has the intensity of undermining The Misfit's confidence. However, the absence of the Sun corresponds to the absence of Christian life in Bailey's household that is reflected in the story's opening on a day children read the funny papers and Bailey reads the color-printed sports section — a Sunday, on which it appears the family did not attend church or Sunday school. Also, the story's narration on the lives of Bailey and his family is absent of any religious thoughts or practices which is significant to any story by an author known for her focus on the spiritual lives of her characters. However, the naming of the eight-year-old son for Methodist theologian John Wesley, suggests religious activity was then more vigorous. The naming of the seven-year-old daughter as June Star, a name with Christian, pagan, and secular connotations, suggests a diminishing influence of religion in family life in only one year; and the infant with no Christian name at all suggests that all formal religious practices within the household have completely stopped, consistent with their absence in the plot. In particular, the church-centered social life of Southern ladies that exists even in current-day Atlanta is entirely absent from the grandmother's life. O'Connor described both the grandmother and her killer as people "cut off from Grace".^[20] Given that the social environment of a church community is essential to a genteel Southern lady's life, the lack of religion in Bailey's household suggests an argument about church-going and church-life the mother had and lost against her son. The argument may have been repeated if the grandmother suggested her grandchildren attend Sunday school. The deprivation and the agreed to code of silence would have lingered as resentment in the grandmother's memory.

Bailey[]

Bailey is the bald head of an Atlanta, Georgia middle class, intergenerational household consisting of an unnamed young wife, three young children, and his mother. Given the original publication date of the story, Bailey was likely a World War II veteran, and his son, John Wesley was born around the end of World War II.

Bailey's name alludes to Jack Bailey, the host of the popular radio and television game show "Queen for a Day" that ran from 1945 to 1964. "Queen for a day" is a phrase used by Bailey's daughter to describe his mother. Given the format for the game show, Bailey's game host persona is to receive his mother's daily tales about life's adversities and her contemporary complaints that are overhead by the entire family.

Bailey's mother[]

Bailey's mother is the protagonist of the story, a woman who seems content with a comfortable life surrounded by her son and grandchildren who she obviously loves. She is, presumably, a widow. The character's mythic roles, as O'Connor suggested them, are that of a Southern lady and matriarch. To denote the lack of respect paid to the character, the narrator refers to her as "grandmother" (always with a small "g") when at least one grandchild is alive, "old lady" when her grandchildren are dead, and a "young lady" as she recalls a plantation home near her native Tennessee home. The central conflict of the story is between the grandmother and The Misfit, her killer, in a dialogue that occurs while Bailey, his wife and children are shot in the woods not far from the two characters.

The old lady seems stereotypically elderly and incompetent, as she reacts spontaneously and vociferously by speaking before assessing the implications or even accuracy of what she has spoken. Her granddaughter likens her to "queen for a day", a comment by a cynical brat covering the grandmother's tales of adversity and complaints, the female winner on the game show with the same title who was most successful, as measured by an audience applause meter, in portraying adversity in her life.

A Southern lady[]

Matthew Day characterizes characters like the grandmother as the author's portrayal of people who conform with the Southern ideal of manners in their appearance, behavior, and a contributor towards their moral corruption:

"For the White women who populate this fictional landscape the Southern code of manners reserves a kind of pre-articulate, vernacular model of feminine virtue that might be called 'gracious living.' ... Gracious living is a particular kind of moral sensibility, an ethos that is expressed by the "habits of choice" that her characters manifest in every domain of their lives. Manners are, in other words, the embodiment of the Southern woman’s moral life."^[21]

Given the grandmother's past is that of a Southern lady through she is limited to appearing and acting like one, as she is a member of a dying breed, widowed, cut-off for het connections in east Tennessee, and cut-off from a Christian church. She lacks the wealth to live as a lady, as the grandmother's very large valise is an example of the total attire required for a short three-day trip. She longs for the agrarian South of her younger days, including plantations, relationships with young men, and impoverished black people. Her compulsion to revisit her past as a lady in the form of a revisit to a plantation home triggers the diversion of her family road trip towards their extermination.

The grandmother is more than nostalgic for the South of her younger years. She still believes in the political and economic principles and social structure of the Old South: state's rights reflected in her scolding John Wesley for disparaging Georgia and Tennessee; oppressed as the fitting state for black Americans reflected in her admiration for the image of a destitute black child; and kinship as the basis for social status and power or what she calls "good blood" that is not "common", respectively.

A powerless matriarch and grandmother[]

Bailey's mother, as the eldest member of the family, is the matriarch of her Southern family, a traditional role of leadership for decision-making, spiritual and moral guidance, and advisor to family members. Bailey, his wife, and children will not, and consequently, do not recognize her as matriarch. For the sake of peace and order within the family, her lack of competence (as exemplified by her comical antics), and in recognition of her dependency on her son for survival, Bailey's mother tolerates a diminished role in family life, and lets her son lead it though she occasionally tries to assert it. The opening scene of the story can be seen as the way she attempts to assert her matriarchal authority by suggesting the family visit east Tennessee to meet her matriarchal connections but no one is interested in connecting with them in preference for recreation, so no one gives her suggestion any respect. The matriarch's rebuke of June Star is an expression of her inability to assert matriarchal authority with a toothless punishment that is not even recognized as a threat.

The old lady's grandchildren can complain about her presence on their trip and everywhere else because she doesn't serve as a moral or disciplinary authority. The children can ignore her without consequence. The grandmother is adept at undermining and disrespecting Bailey and his wife as a means of getting what she wants without asserting matriarchal authority, reaching its pinnacle on the Florida trip with her taking the cat on as a stowaway without telling anybody and manipulating her grandchildren to divert the road trip toward the mistaken adventure to the east Tennessee plantation house that is not in Georgia.

The last expressions of Bailey's mother's expression of matriarchal authority is her order for him to "Come back this instant!" as he is taken away to be executed. The scene is another example of her frustration with powerlessness. Even after Bailey is shot, he still is her lower-ranked "boy" and not the man who is the family's leader. From this perspective the character is the nameless grandmother because the matriarchal leadership role for the old ladies of her generation has been rejected by her family. (O'Connor addresses her character in writings as "Grandmother".)

Mother and son[]

As an old-fashioned lady with old-fashioned values, Bailey's mother is a misfit with her family. Beneath the superficiality of the story's action that presents a common old-fashioned "granny", the facts about Bailey's family suggest a deep troubled relationship with Bailey that amounts to great disappointments for her. Bailey is a divorced man who has remarried and his older children may not know that his current wife is not their birth mother that separately represent stains on the ideal of Southern kinship. Bailey's mother likely agreed to keep everything about their birth mother secret from the older children. Bailey and his current wife appear common — typically suburban, and not the Southern gentleman and lady that give the appearance of kinship with a Southern family with "good blood". The lack of any reference to religion or church in the story suggests a decision to preclude them from their lives and, given the church-centered social life of a Southern lady, an intra-family argument the grandmother lost and agreed to not speak about. Her dialogue with The Misfit dressed as her son suggests recall of her discussion with Bailey about his resistance to Christian faith. In spite of the disappointments and resentments Bailey's mother harbors about her son, she proves that she loves him in her dialogue with her killer. Bailey has provided her with a comfortable home and has surrounded his mother with children she enjoys doting on. Even so, she has had other great disappointments. Her husband and lack of thoughts of him as a man comparable to Edgar Atkins Teagarden suggests that she once had a much grander vision of social status than realized by the toil of her husband.

Lack of preparation for death[]

On the road to Florida, the grandmother admires a graveyard amid a cotton field while holding her infant grandchild in her lap, and thinks of it nostalgically rather than triggering contemplation of her own mortality. O'Connor characterized her, from a Catholic point of view, as a woman not spiritually prepared to face death: "The heroine of this story, the Grandmother, is in the most significant position life offers the Christian. She is facing death. And to all appearances she, like the rest of us, is not too well prepared for it. She would like to see the event postponed. Indefinitely."^[22] The Catholic theological event O'Connor referred to is God's Particular Judgment of the grandmother's soul immediately after death.

Bailey's nameless wife and nameless infant[]

"Queen for a Day" host Jack Bailey in a promotional photo.

Bailey's wife is a nearly speechless woman described as a "young woman" having a face that was "as broad and innocent as a cabbage". She is not identified by name, only as "the children's mother". In the story's narration, she is solely occupied with caring for her baby that suggests it is her first one. Like her husband, she does little to discipline her children. In the car accident, she is thrown out of the car and breaks her shoulder. Her injury doesn't receive the attention of any character.

Given Bailey's wife's namelessness, physical characteristics, and sparse action and dialogue, she appears to be lacking a soul, though her presence always with Bailey throughout the story suggests submissiveness.

Given the likely age of Bailey's "young woman" wife and the eight-year-old son, John Wesley was born when the young woman was a teenager, which could suggest marriage to Bailey as a teenager, pregnancy before marriage, or that Bailey's current wife is not John Wesley's mother at all. Given the gap in ages between June Star and the baby and the attention the young mother gives the baby, the last is suggested, consistent with both mother and infant having no names. Bailey and his first wife were divorced, and the divorce is something John Wesley and June Star have accepted or are likely unaware of given the date of the divorce and a promise made by the adults to not talk about it or Bailey's first wife.

Infidelity on the part of Bailey is suggested by her wife's innocent looks and soulless demeanor. Infidelity is also suggested by the production of the "Queen for a Day" quiz show, as its producers surrounded the older host, Jack Bailey, with beautiful young women. The relevance to the short story is that the gradmother can recognize her killer as being similar to her son since both were married twice. The Misfit and Bailey were also military veterans and lack Christian faith, both circumstances that had great effects on the mother and son relationship.

John Wesley and June Star[]

Bailey's older children are John Wesley and June Star, aged eight and seven, respectively, two brats — rowdy and disrespectful. Their self-centeredness is so extreme that they are never aware that their mother, thrown out of the moving car during the accident, has a broken shoulder. They have learned to manipulate their parents by screaming and yelling at them, behavior the grandmother has learned to initiate in order to manipulate and undermine their parents. Their behavior suggests a continuation of the disappearance of traditional Southern manners that their hypocritical grandmother regards as ideals — respect for parents and elders, discipline, and allegiance to one's home state.

John Wesley's namesake is the eighteenth century Protestant theologian John Wesley, who helped establish the principle doctrines of Methodism, and who was inspired by the practices of members of the Moravian Church among Georgian colonists, which suggests the family regards themselves as Methodists. The boy, as well as his sister, appear to have little understanding of Methodism or John Wesley's relevance to Georgia as he declares his home state "lousy" and suggests to his father driving the family car: “Let's go through Georgia fast so we won't have to look at it much."

June Star is likely named for Polaris, the North Star, that is especially prominent during the month of June.^[23] The North Star's position in the night sky is useful in navigation and is regarded as a "guiding light" symbolizing Jesus as a spiritual and moral guide. As the "Pole Star", Polaris also symbolizes God in that all other stars in the sky viewed in the Northern Hemisphere revolve around it, though as a metaphor, June Star enjoys being the center of attention, and with her dancing display at a restaurant, her "star" nature is more aligned with show business than with nature or religion. The character's disrespect for everyone runs so deep that she denounces the man that holds the gun that will kill her together with her mother and infant sibling and has already killed her father and brother.

Pitty Sing[]

Pitty Sing is the pet cat of Baily's family. Its name might be Southern slang for "pretty thing" or the namesake for Pitti-Sing young female character from the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, The Mikado, who is falsely blamed with her siblings for the execution of another character.^[24] The cat causes Bailey to drive his car off the road and crash, and after the accident, Bailey throws it at a tree, which it survives unscathed. After Bailey and his family are murdered, The Misfit returns the cat's affection for his leg by picking it up, the sole demonstration of his affection for any living creature in the story — an image of evil and innocence.

Characters at The Tower restaurant[]

Bailey and his family stop at The Tower restaurant outside Timothy, Georgia for lunch, where they appear to be the only customers. The Tower premises includes a gas station and dance hall. Red Sammy Butts runs the operation, and is the apparent owner, as signage along the highway mentions the "famous", "veteran", "fat boy with the happy laugh" Red Sammy by name along with his "famous barbecue". The family's encounter with Red Sammy and The Tower is nothing like what was advertised. The family is seated in an empty restaurant attended by the fat proprietor, who is full of complaints, and his waitress wife. Bailey's daughter describes the place as "broken-down" after her dancing is praised by Red Sammy's wife. Red Sammy treats his wife as if the restaurant is busy with patrons by ordering her off to the kitchen, preventing her from conversing with the family.

Red Sammy Butts[]

Red Sammy enters into a dialogue with the grandmother that Evans characterizes as a "festival of clichés" where "[e]very single one of his opening phrases is a commonplace platitude" that does, however, reveal his character as competitive, suspicious of others, and self-justifying. ^[25] The dialogue is between a two people who find each other likeable because they enjoy complaining together.

When the grandmother agrees with Red Sammy's platitudes by saying that "People are certainly not nice like they used to be", Red Sammy responds that he regrets that he let two men driving an "old beat-up Chrysler" to buy gasoline on credit. The grandmother misinterprets Red Sammy by exclaiming his generosity by calling him a "good man", where the man responds: "'Yes'm, I suppose so,' Red Sam said as if he were struck with this answer."

The grandmother suggests to Red Sammy that The Misfit might attack The Tower, though he ignored the comment to take the opportunity to complain with the platitude that is the story's title: "'A good man is hard to find', Red Sammy said. 'Everything is getting terrible. I remember the day you could go off and leave your screen door unlatched. Not no more.'" The complaint is comical because a house that is open except for an unlatched screen door is no serious barrier for a violent criminal. The grandmother who watches "Queen for a Day" may have found a kindred spirit in the complaint-filled proprietor — she does not perceive Red Sammy's comment as witless or objectionable, nor does she appreciate the differences between the road advertisements and the man or the restaurant. The dialogue ends with a narrative comment using Red Sammy's monkey.

Red Sammy Butts' wife[]

The wife of the fat owner of The Tower is a "a tall burnt-brown woman with hair and eyes lighter than her skin" who works as a waitress. In the story, Red Sammy directs his wife as if she was any ordinary waitress, preventing her to enter into sociable chat with Baily's family. She tolerates an insult from June Star in the interest of business revenue by deflecting it: "Ain't she cute" and "stretching her mouth slightly". She testifies that cupidity has undermined trust in all human relationships, even those between spouses: “'It isn't a soul in this green world of God's that you can trust,' she said. 'And I don't count nobody out of that, not nobody,' she repeated, looking at Red Sammy.'" Red Sammy ignores his wife's comment and doesn't defend himself even though he appears to be accused of infidelity.

The wife's skin color and comment about the infidelity of her husband alludes to Bessie Smith's 1928 recording of the Eddie Green song "A Good Man Is Hard to Find".

Gray monkey[]

Red Sammy Butts' pet monkey appears for the arrival and departure of Bailey and his family at The Tower. On arrival, the monkey fears John Wesley and June Star and climbs up into the chinaberry tree it is chained to for safety. On departure, the monkey is seen pleasurably eating the fleas that it has picked off itself, an image appearing just after the grandmother and Red Sammy Butts agree with a sense of finality that "Europe was entirely to blame for the way things were now". As the monkey's fleas contain its own flesh, its grotesque action is a comic narrative comment that the grandmother and Mr. Butts are fools given the allusion to Ecclesiastes 4:5: "The fool folds his hands and eats his own flesh."

Hiram and Bobby Lee[]

Hiram and Bobby Lee are convicts who escaped prison with The Misfit. The two kill Bailey, his wife and children, and on the murder of the grandmother by The Misfit, Bobby Lee suggests to The Misfit that killing her was enjoyable. The Misfit's response to Bobby Lee indicates that Bobby Lee's expectation was serious, and not a joke, reflecting Bobby Lee's passion for sadism and his recruitment in the rebellion, as with Hiram, as an obedient killer who is unaware of or doesn't understand The Misfit's cause.

Given The Misfit's quote of Qoheleth from Ecclesiastes, and Qoheleth's claim to be King Solomon, Hiram is likely named for one or more biblical characters each associated with assisting the ruler in the construction of Solomon's Temple. (See the article "Hiram Abiff".) The Misfit's selection of Hiram as an accomplice suggests The Misfit's role as a prophet, as O'Connor referred to The Misfit as a prophet in letters, and the preacher Qoheleth referred to himself to open Ecclesiastes: "The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem." (Ecclesiastes 1:1) The Misfit's gentlemanly demeanor and sermon-like approach in his dialogue with Bailey's mother suggests that the killer is trying to emulate King Solomon's biblical roles as royalty and a spiritual leader.

Bobby Lee is named for Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general who is often thought of as a model Southern gentleman, and so, alludes to a rebellion. The appearance and actions of Bobby Lee and June Star's characterization of him as a "pig" reflects O'Connor's negative opinion of the Confederate icon.

The naked child[]

Just outside of Atlanta, the grandmother sees from the road a young black boy she calls a "pickaninny" standing in the doorway of a shack. She says, admiringly that the scene is iconic: "If I could paint, I'd paint that picture." June Star comments that the boy has no pants, and the grandmother ignores the picture of devastating poverty as just the state of being for rural black people: "Little niggers in the country don't have things like we do." The grandmother who, throughout the story, longingly refers to her past and only things in the present that remind her of her younger days, remarks that she sees beauty in poverty, that the ideal state for black people is quiet obedience in destitution to the racial and economic oppression that was the Jim Crow South ideal of Southern ladies of the era. The grandmother's indifference to the plight of the oppressed, hypocritical with respect to the doctrines of her own religion, contrasts sharply with The Misfit's viewpoints on suffering caused by oppression and injustice.

Violence[]

Violence as a character theme[]

O'Connor explained that she used violence in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" to make her characters become more concerned with spiritual matters and to express theological themes through character actions.

In a 1963 introduction to the story at a reading at Hollins College in Roanoke, Virginia, O'Connor explained she used violence because she saw no other way to bring her characters to their senses, which is say to at least get them to recognize the offering of divine grace:

"...[I]n my own stories I have found that violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace. Their heads are so hard that almost nothing else will do the work. This idea, that reality is something to which we must be returned at considerable cost, is one which is seldom understood by the casual reader, but it is one which is implicit in the Christian view of the world."^[26]

In "A Good Man Is Hard to Find", the imminent death of the Bailey's family, particularly the grandmother, presents each member with the very last opportunity to complete a deed that will favor their Christian salvation since Catholics believe God will judge each person's soul immediately after death. O'Connor said:

"... the man in the violent situation reveals those qualities least dispensable in his personality, those qualities which are all he will have to take into eternity with him; and since the characters in this story are all on the verge of eternity, it is appropriate to think of what they take with them."^[27]

As the story concludes, from a Roman Catholic perspective, only the grandmother performs an act that contributes toward her justification.^{[citation needed]}

Themes[]

The crumbling Southern social order[]

As a theme in Flannery O'Connor's works and calling it her "greatest gift", Hilton Als identified the depiction "with humor and without judgment her rapidly crumbling social order."^[28] The depiction is an aspect of what O'Connor called the anguish Southern writers feel when the virtues of passing generations are lost as the South is being reformed:

"The anguish that most of us [Southern writers] have observed for some time now has been caused not by the fact that the South is alienated from the rest of the country, but by the fact that it is not alienated enough, that every day we are getting more and more like the rest of the country, that we are being forced out not only of our many sins, but of our few virtues. This may be unholy anguish but it is anguish nevertheless."^[29]

The "sins" being removed as realized in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" are racial and economic inequality and oppression as represented by the naked child, and a "virtue" being lost by the passing of a generation of Southern ladies represented by the grandmother in her dress and hat embellished with garden flowers is the practice of Christian religion. The grandmother's defense of her faith while facing her killer enables her to perform a redemptive act in contrast to the rest of the family's passivity while facing death.

The grandmother, with her cheery disposition set for a Florida vacation trip, sees the passing of her generation and the objects dear to it with the humor of acceptance — "Gone with the wind" she jokes, in spite the of the explicit unhappy circumstances of the story that are signs of a crumbling social order that is passing into history: the deaths of her husband and Edgar Atkins Teagarden, a plantation home that likely has been destroyed, camp meeting revivals, and Sundays at a church.

Anguish, mercy, charity, divine grace, and imitation of God[]

The author's intent[]

In a 1960 response to a letter from novelist John Hawkes, Flannery O'Connor explained the significance of divine grace in Catholic theology in contrast to Protestant theology, and in doing so, explained the offers of grace made to the grandmother and The Misfit at the climax of the story immediately after the already agitated Misfit explained his anguish caused by not being able to witness whether or not Jesus is savior and that it was by faith alone that the decided Jesus is not savior:

"Cutting yourself off from Grace is a very decided matter, required a real choice, act of will, and affecting the very ground of the soul. The Misfit is touched by the Grace that comes through the old lady when she recognizes him as her child, as she has been touched by the Grace that comes through him in his particular suffering."^[20]

Both the superficial grandmother and the heretic The Misfit have cut themselves off from opportunities to receive divine grace prior to the story. The deprivation of religion and church life from a Southern lady's social life is devastating and the absence of religion in the story's narrative by an author concerned with spiritual life suggests that the grandmother lost an argument with Bailey about church-going and participation in a church community that the grandmother resented and regarded as a deprivation. At the story's climax, The Misfit, while wearing Bailey's shirt, is in anguish just after he explains the suffering he has witnessed and felt in his own life, alludes to his judgment that much of the suffering, including death for original sin, is undeserved and, to the extent it is undeserved is a form of oppression that he can end by killing the victims of oppression. The Misfit's anguish "clears for an instant" the grandmother's head, as she recalls the argument she had and lost with Bailey about the relevance of God and church-going, and takes the opportunity to try to win the same argument with her killer by imitating God himself (e.g., "God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him." in 1 John 4:16) in an act of mercy that also demonstrates Christian charity (e.g., the love for others as one loves God): "Why you're one of my babies. You're one of my own children." The point is emphasized by the grandmother's posture in death is a likeness of the dead body of Jesus on the cross.

As for The Misfit, O'Connor explained that the opportunity of grace is offered to him by the grandmother's touching him, an act she calls a gesture:

"Her [the grandmother's] head clears for an instant and she realizes, even in her limited way, that she is responsible for the man before her and joined to him by ties of kinship which have their roots deep in the mystery she has been merely prattling about so far. And at this point, she does the right thing, she makes the right gesture."^[30]

O'Connor's reference to the "mystery" the grandmother prattled about is the incarnation of Jesus as savior as the means for people to be absolved for their sins in order to be eternally joined with God, and in that context, "kinship" refers to all people in that they are descendants of Adam and Eve who committed the sin that would forever separate humans from God and brought death upon humanity as a punishment for the original sin. O'Connor further clarified that the grandmother's actions were selfless: "... the grandmother is not in the least concerned with God but reaches out to touch the Misfit".^[31]

In her letter to John Hawkes, O'Connor explained that The Misfit did not accept the offer of grace in her story but that the grandmother's gesture did change him:

"His [The Misfit's] shooting her is a recoil, a horror at her humanness, but after he has done it and cleaned his glasses, the Grace has worked in him and he pronounces his judgment: she would have been a good woman if he had been there every moment of her life."^[20]

Criticism[]

The grandmother's gesture toward The Misfit has been criticized as an unreasonable action by a character often perceived as intellectually, or morally, or spiritually incapable of doing it. For example, Stephen C. Bandy wrote in 1996, thirty-two years after the author's death:

"... if one reads the story without prejudice, there would seem to be little here to inspire hope for redemption of any of its characters. No wishful search for evidence of grace or for epiphanies of salvation, by author or reader, can soften the harsh truth of 'A Good Man Is Hard To Find.' Its message is profoundly pessimistic and in fact subversive to the doctrines of grace and charity, despite heroic efforts to disguise that fact."^[32]

In addition, some critics like James Mellard resent O'Connor's efforts to explain the story to fill-in the narrative they expected to underlie the story's climax:

"O'Connor simply tells her readers — either through narrative interventions or be extra-textual exhortations — how they are to interpret her work."^[33]

O'Connor's rebuttal was that such readers and critics have underestimated the grandmother. As indicated in her letters, lectures, readings, and essays, O'Connor felt compelled to explain the story and the gesture years after publication, for example, as "Reasonable Use of the Unreasonable", the title of her notes for a 1962 reading at Hollins College in Virginia.^[34] O'Connor believed one understandable reason for the criticism is that the concept of grace she used is unique to a Roman Catholic perspective, as she clarified the point to John Hawkes in a letter:

"In the Protestant view, I think Grace and nature don't have much to do with each other. The old lady, because of her hypocrisy and humanness and banality couldn't be a medium for Grace. In the sense that I see things the other way, I'm a Catholic writer."^[35]

By mentioning "nature", O'Connor refers to her anagogical vision, which she addresses the grandmother's spiritual life which has been enlivened by the threat to her life. She wrote in her reading notes:

"The action or gesture I'm talking about would have to be on the anagogical level, that is, the level which has to do with the Divine life and our participation in it. It would be a gesture that transcended any neat allegory that might have been intended or any pat moral categories a reader could make. It would be a gesture which somehow made contact with mystery."^[36]

For her reading, O'Connor noted the grandmother was "responsible for the man before her and joined to him by ties of kinship which have their roots deep in the mystery she has been merely prattling about so far",^[37] in which the mystery is God's love for mankind through the incarnation and death of his son, Jesus. The reference to the grandmother's kinship is not only to The Misfit, but also to her living and past connections in east Tennessee, where a focus of her lady friends and relatives social lives revolve around a Methodist church; and her son, whom she loved even though he was involved in removing religion from her life. From this perspective, the reader is not to dismiss the grandmother as a parody of a Southern lady of years past — she is one as a comical misfit with modern times that has cut her off from everything that sustains a lady, including the church. In short, the author expected the reader to understand what the life of a Southern lady is like and the importance of her character's concern to maintain her identity as one in both appearances and manners: the beginning of the story with her failed attempt to reconnect with her kindred spirits in east Tennessee; the attire she wore in Bailey's car; her memory of the black people she was accustomed to seeing; her relationship with Edgar Atkins Teagarden as a "maiden lady"; her compulsion to stop at a plantation home she visited in the past; and her understanding of the importance of having "good blood". Overall, O'Connor's rebuttal relies on the reader's perception of the spiritual strengths the grandmother acquired in her past and were only brought to bare with her spiritual duel with The Misfit that is the climax of the story.

Adaptations[]

A film adaptation of the short story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find", entitled Black Hearts Bleed Red, was made in 1992 by New York filmmaker Jeri Cain Rossi. The film stars noted New York artist Joe Coleman,^[38] but according to reviewers the film does not depict the story well.^{[citation needed]}

The American folk musician Sufjan Stevens adapted the story into a song going by the same title. It appears on his 2004 album Seven Swans. The song is written in the first-person from the point of view of The Misfit.

In May 2017, Deadline Hollywood reported that director John McNaughton would make a feature film adaptation of the story starring Michael Rooker, from a screenplay by Benedict Fitzgerald.^[39]

See also[]

• Anagoge
• Charity (virtue)
• Divine grace
• Ecclesiastes
• Jesus and the Rich Young Man
• Methodism
• Particular Judgment
• Sheol
• Southern gothic literature

References[]

Works cited[]

"Ecclesiastes". The Holy Bible. English Standard Version.

Bandy, Stephen (1996), 'One of my Babies': The Misfit and the Grandmother, Studies in Short Fiction, pp. 107–117, archived from the original on January 4, 2012

Bartholomew, Craig (May 1999). "Qoheleth in the Canon?! Current Trends in the Interpretation of Ecclesiastes". Themelios. 24 (3): 4–20.

Evans, Robert C. (2010). "Clichés, Superficial Story-Telling, and the Dark Humor of Flannery O'Connor's 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find'". In Bloom, Harold; Hobby, Blake (eds.). Bloom's Literary Themes: Dark Humor. Infobase Publishing. pp. 139–148. ISBN 9781438131023.

Giannone, Richard (2008). "Making It in Darkness". Flannery O'Connor Review. The Board of Regents of the Georgia College and State University System. 6: 103–118. JSTOR 26671141.

Green, Eddie (1918). "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" (PDF). Wikimedia Commons. Pace Handy Music Company.

O'Connor, Flannery (2012). Fitzgerald, Sally; Fitzgerald, Robert (eds.). Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 9781466829046.

O'Connor, Flannery (1979). Fitzgerald, Sally (ed.). The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 9780374521042.

External links[]

• Online text of the short story
• Flannery O'Connor reading "A Good Man Is Hard to Find"