Flannery O’Connor’s short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” details a road trip gone wrong, as a southern family steers themselves right into the hands of a serial killer. The protagonist is a grandmother with skewed social values and norms, as well as the beginnings of cognitive impairment or dementia. When she mistakenly tells her son to head to the wrong state to find a house from her distant memories, the grandmother sets in motion a chain of events that leads to the death of her whole family. Using violent imagery, Flannery O’Connor provides an inherently pessimistic tale with a nihilistic theme.The title of the story refers to a line delivered by a minor character, Red Sammy, the restaurant owner. Red Sammy and the grandmother are from the same generation, which waxes nostalgic about what they believe to have been better times after discussing the serial killer on the loose, the Misfit. “A good man is hard to find,” laments Red Sammy, “Everything is getting terrible. I remember the day you could go off and leave your screen door unlatched. Not no more,” (O’Connor 142). Neither the grandmother nor Red Sammy can acknowledge that bad men or evil people have always existed; the fact that the Misfit is on the loose now does not necessarily mean that the world is falling apart. With cognitive bias and logical fallacy, though, the grandmother and Red Sammy blame the outside world and cultivate a sense of fear and mistrust. Their conversation suggests that the grandmother has a pessimistic worldview, one of the major themes of the story.

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Because the protagonist, the grandmother, is portrayed as ignorant, O’Connor seems to warn readers that being ignorant is as bad as being cynical or pessimistic. The Misfit’s menacing words, “She would have been a good woman...if it been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life,” suggests that the grandmother’s ignorance is as sinister and devastating to humanity as the Misfit’s violence (O’Connor 153). The grandmother’s ignorance is ironic when placed next to the Misfit’s comparatively logical point of view. Whereas the Misfit simply accepts evil as a part of life, the grandmother clings to the illusion that there was once a time where all men were good. Her notion of what it means to be a “lady” ties in with her false beliefs about “good men.” Just as there is no such thing as a truly “good man,” there is no such thing as a “real lady.”
A corollary of the main them of pessimism is related to the uselessness of religion for inspiring human beings to rise above their base instincts. Religion has never ensured human beings will be good. Furthermore, people like the grandmother use religion as a shield instead of genuinely working on their own behaviors to become better people. Religion symbolizes human ignorance and hypocrisy in “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” For example, the grandmother never once mentions God, religion, or her faith until she meets The Misfit, suggesting that the old woman is hypocritical in nature.…