Reaction to “A Good Man is Hard to Find” Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is one of the most bizarre yet interesting short stories I have ever read. It begins with a family taking a trip in their car—but the protagonist (the Grandmother), who acts like an antagonist to her son Bailey, is dead-set on hijacking the car trip and getting the son to take them to where she wants to go. The descriptions that O’Connor uses to characterize the family are very funny and have a brutal honesty about them. O’Connor is not trying to paint a sympathetic portrait of an American family in the south. She is writing satire in the style of Gogol—and it is quite funny. It is also quite sad at the same time. O’Connor is able to make the reader life while simultaneously breaking the reader’s heart. And she does this without ever voyaging into any type of sentimentality. Moreover, she does not even keep the story in this stylistic mode. Towards the end, she introduces the Misfit who is on a murder-spree. One by one, the Misfit and his henchmen execute the members of the family off in the woods in what can only be described as the most horrific moment in literature that I have ever read—and the violence is not even depicted gratuitously: it is only suggested. Still the horror that dawns on the family members as they realize they are all about to die is gripping. O’Connor thus goes from straight-up satire to gut-checking horror—and...

Why? The arrival of the Misfit and Death actually makes the family start to act as a real family. Order is instituted—and all it took was for someone to wave a gun over their heads and take them off to be killed. Bailey expresses tenderness to the Grandmother: “I’ll be back in a minute, Mamma, wait on me!” The Grandmother begins to take a real interest in someone other than herself—and it’s the Misfit.
Why? The Misfit talks like a real, intelligent human being: he is thoughtful, considerate, cautious and not at all rude like her ill-tempered kin. He also has the weapon that will take all their lives—so the Grandmother begins to demonstrate caution, too. Her words, however, are also tempered by mercy and charity. Instead of yelling and screeching at the Misfit as she does to her grandchildren when she tries to correct them, she speaks to the Misfit as from some place deep down in her soul: she really wants to reach him—it suddenly becomes one of the most important, emotional things…