A Good Man is Hard to Find Flannery O\\\'Connor

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.

Moreover, their conversation implies that ignorance may also be the root of evil. 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. When the grandmother meets the Misfit, she quickly tries to use religion to manipulate him. Fearing for her life, the grandmother lies and says, “I know you're a good man at heart. I can just look at you and tell,” (O’Connor 147). The grandmother does not mean what she says, showing how all people—not just serial killers like the Misfit—are unethical. The serial killer has given up on trying to be good, or on trying to be religious. He finds people like the grandmother utterly distasteful because of their ignorance and hypocrisy.

The Misfit’s presence in the story shows O’Connor might have a dismal view of human nature. Ironically, the Misfit seems more intelligent than the grandmother. Although he is violent, debased, and evil, the Misfit is not hypocritical or delusional like the grandmother. Unlike the grandmother, the Misfit does not lie either. When the story reaches its climax, the Misfit claims that his parents were fine people: “God never made a finer woman than my mother and my daddy's heart was pure gold,” (O’Connor 147). Indeed, they probably were. The Misfit’s evil nature is not attributable to anything logical except perhaps frustration at the current state of society symbolized by the ignorant grandmother. If he did not experience childhood trauma to get him where he is now, then the Misfit is a killer simply for the pleasure of it, rendering him a pure sociopath. However, the final line of the short story is uttered by the Misfit, who states, “It’s no real pleasure in life,” (O’Connor 153). It is impossible to find pleasure in the grandmother’s way of life, or in the Misfit’s. Letting the Misfit have the last line of the tale is a significant and meaningful literary device for O’Connor. The author is essentially allowing the Misfit to provide the theme of the story in a direct and literal way: life is devoid of meaning or pleasure.

Although “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is mainly a literal tale, O’Connor does insert a few symbols to anchor the story’s main meaning and message. For example, Red Sammy issues the title line and his restaurant is called The Tower. The Tower could symbolize the Tower of Babel from the Bible, referencing the proverbial disarray of human communication. Human beings not only speak different languages, but they also have different worldviews. Values, norms, and ethics are inherent to worldview. The idea of a “good man” to the grandmother or to Red Sammy is different from the idea of a “good man” held by any other character in the book, including the Misfit.

The nihilistic theme of “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is related to human nature, and the universal tendency towards ignorance. The violent story and the dark ending imply that O’Connor might have herself cultivated a pessimistic worldview having encountered people as ignorant as the grandmother and as violent as the Misfit. The story’s characters, setting, and plot all help to emphasize the nihilistic and pessimistic theme about the darkness in human nature.


Works Cited

O’Connor, Flannery. “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” Retrieved online: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~drbr/goodman.html