Goodness is the right and wise conduct that is being displayed by an individual. It is this conduct that builds the strong and bold character of a person. The story “A good man is hard to find” by Flannery O’Connor is portray the evil that resides in the character of a person that makes the life of other people vulnerable. It is the evil that is silent and blunt and has no pity. The story is about the belief in life and God, good and evil, morality and immorality, faith and doubt. It is also about the perception of the things that might happen in real life. As it is well said and known that our thoughts make our reality, so happens in this story. The thought and perception of a lady manifest their reality.
The introductory part of “A Good Man Is Hard to find” familiarizes us with an unpleasant domestic life where every member is devastated by the other member, and there is no good respect for everyone’s consent. The beginning of the story depicts as if this clan is planning to go to Florida for a vacation. But the grandmother suspects the travel and gets an instinct not to go there. She makes excuses like she wants to see some connections in another town. However, they eventually traveled to Florida.
The grandmother in this story is a stiff lady with her beliefs and imposing thoughts. The story says, “The old lady settled herself comfortably, removing her white cotton gloves and putting them up with her purse on the shelf in front of the back window” (OConnor, 138). The impression of the grandmother in the story is that she tends to be a very decent and rich lady who is good with manners and firmly believes in sticking with society’s norms and culture. She is a lady with a modest sense of dressing up. On their way to Florida, she has dressed well while in the back of her mind she is doing so as if in the case of an accident when people find her dead they must have the impression of her as a good old rich lady. This shows the superficial and shallow character of the lady, who is more concerned about her impression of society.
They say older people have got good instincts; this proves to be right in this story. The grandmother gets a gut feeling that they should not be going to Florida and she starts making excuses like “Here this fellow that calls himself The Misfit is loose from the Federal Pen and headed toward Florida and you read here what it says he did to these people. Just you read it. I wouldn’t take my children in any direction with a criminal like that loose in it. I couldn’t answer to my conscience if I did” (OConnor, 1). It suggests as if she had got a strong instinct that alarmed her to withdraw the plan as if something wrong is going to happen.
The family met an accident on their way when the children asked to visit the plantation. It was a road full of dirt with no other car or traffic. They waited there in the hope of some help. Suddenly they saw a car coming towards them. It stopped at a distance from them. “It was a big black battered hearse-like automobile. There were three men in it” (OConnor, 145). They came to them and looked at everyone closely, but the grandmother kept noticing the man with a wrinkled face and tried to remember as she knows him. The grandmother shrieked. She scrambled to her feet and stood to stare. “You’re The Misfit!” she said. “I recognized you at once!” (OConnor, 147), the grandmother’s worries came true when she found he was Misfit. Each of them lately was taken towards the woods, and he then asked his men to shoot them all dead.
The old woman requests and begs the evil man to leave her. The story says, “finally she found herself saying, “Jesus. Jesus,” meaning, Jesus will help you, but the way she was saying it, it sounded as if she might be cursing” (OConnor, 151). All alone the grandmother and the evil guy, the lady begs him and tries hard to sway him and threatens him with the anger and justice of God but he complains in the answer that Jesus provided him no other option between visionless belief and forceful negativism. He seems to have so much pain and hatred toward the world. The lady sensed that and got empathetic toward him. She tries to soothe his pain and so reaches near him to give him the warmth of gentle touch, but the evil guy gets annoyed and shoots three dead shots onto her chest.
Hence this story reveals a sad reality of our society. It is true that good people are hard to find. We cannot count on every person who comes across our lives as a good person as we never know what this person intends for us. We have got vulnerable in today’s world. The story says, “A good man is hard to find,” Red Sammy said. “Everything is getting terrible. I remember that day you could go off and leave your screen door unlatched. Not no more” (OConnor, 43). This suggests that good men especially the strangers who we happen to meet once in life are not trustworthy even for help in extremely bad situations like accidents.
Work Cited
OConnor, Flannery. A good man is hard to find. London: Faber and Faber, 2016. Print.
