Her insistence of turning down the dirt road is what gets the family into trouble. She expects the family to do things her way and she expects everyone to live by her standards. She thinks much of herself and her heritage and tells John, "I wouldn't talk about my native state that way" (O'Connor 1938). When his comment to her is "Tennessee is just a hillbilly dumping ground" (1938), she states, "Children were more respectful of their native states and their parents and everything else. People did right then" (1938). Here we see evidence of how the grandmother believes she is better than the younger, disrespectful generation. Hers is a generation that did the right thing and this frame of mind helps us understand her naivety and gullibility when it comes to the Misfit. She attempts to reason with the Misfit and then has the audacity to ask him to pray as if this advice would be received any better from her than anyone else he had encountered in his life. His powerful reaction to this reveals that he may have more emotion regarding the subject than the grandmother, who believes she is as pious as they come. She does not know the truth about the world and she certainly does not know it about...
Flannery O'Connor uses certain characteristics we have all seen in her stories to prove points about mankind. In "Revelation" and "A Good Man is Hard to Find," we see two women that behave certain ways and turn out to be victims of their own thinking because they refuse to believe that they could be wrong. Mrs. Turpin cannot begin to think that she might be wrong in her estimations of people and the grandmother in "A Good Man is Hard to Find" cannot believe she might be an inconvenience to her family or that she might lead them into danger. These characters are extreme but they force us to look at ourselves in a different way. O'Connor captures the essence of humanity's desire to be right and exposes it for the danger it can cause.
Work Cited
O'Connor, Flannery. "A Good Man is Hard to Find." The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction.
New York W.W. Norton and Company. 1981.
O'Connor, Flannery. "Revelation." Moderns and Contemporaries: Nine masters of the Short
Story. Baumbach, Jonathan, ed. New York: Random House. 1968.
