The plot in "A Good Man is Hard to Find" centers on the grandmother and the Misfit. What I think that O'Connor is trying to show is how the grandmother and the Misfit are very similar. The grandmother sees herself as a respectable, good christian women, buy she is really a prejudice, judgemental, and selfish women. The Misfit sees himself as a not too bad guy, however, he has a record of all the bad things that he has done yet he does not remember them. The grandmother and Misfit both define good in different ways and they both see themselves as basically good.
I would not consider either of them a good person. The grandmother wants to save the Misfit but is she saved herself? I think in the end of the story the grandmother finally sees who she really is and the Misfit helps her do that. She discovers that she no better than the Misfit. She then feels overwhelmed when she finally realizes who she really is and calls him her son because they are so similar. The Misfit does acknowledge that she is no better than he is and he states, "she would have been a good women if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life" (1261). She talked about how to pray and believe God, but she did not live it. The they are both are living in denial of who they are.
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Your understanding of the direction that O’Connor took in this short story is similar to my thoughts. I don’t believe the Misfit and the grandmother knew exactly how much they had in common. They both were mean in their own sense and neither was better than the other. Both the Misfit and the grandmother had few good qualities or maybe it was only the conversation the two shared that made them assume they were truly good people. You are very right when you said that the grandmother spoke continuously about god and praying but she didn’t truly live her life by god. Before the Misfit fatally shot the grandmother she called the Misfit her son. Like you, I believe she called him her son because she at that moment realized that she lived her life no better than he did. The entire story built the ending and moral of the story. She did nothing but bad mouth the Misfit and while doing so we the reader got to know her for the type of person she truly was. Ironically, after a wrong turn on a dirt road which was going to lead the family no where the grandmother met her “son”. At that point the direction of the story became evident.
ReplyDeleteI agree with your point on the misfit identifying some of his deviancies in the grandmother. Perhaps looking at her was in a sense like looking in a mirror because he could see some of his own characteristics in her. As evident by the grandmother's numerous racial comments many people live by laws governed by social norms, not really Godly norms but live in denial of this fact.
ReplyDeleteI find your comments interesting. To be honest it is not at all what I got from the story. While I did see the grandmother as being a bit manipulative, I found myself angry with the son and his family for ignoring the grandmother and treating her disrespectfully. All she wanted to do was relive a few memories from her youth.
ReplyDeleteI figured they were going to run into The Misfit because he kept coming up in her conversations, however, I was expecting them to come out of it alive.
I've tried looking for the similarities between the grandmother and the Misfit but I just don't see them. He is a killer and I don't believe the grandmother is a bad person. She has her faults but not to that degree.