Morality and Disappointment: Two Themes

¶ … Morality and Disappointment: Two Themes in "A Good Man is Hard to Find" and "Araby"

In both Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard To Find," and James Joyce's "Araby," the authors present stories that end with an unexpected sadness. O'Connor's story presents the reader with a typical family on the way to Florida for a vacation. They gripe at each other, annoy each other, and generally try to put up with each other through the day before their trip and the car ride on the way there. Throughout the story, it is the grandmother's voice that the reader hears most often. She tries to make herself sound better or wiser than the rest of the family, although to both the readers and her family she is annoying. Although the reader begins to see O'Connor's family as suffering from some serious psychological issues toward the end of the story, he or she is not prepared for what happens at the end of the story. The family meets the notorious killer, The Misfit, and is killed. Still, one of the last images that the reader sees before the story ends is the grandmother begging and pleading in the outspoken manner she is known for.

Joyce's "Araby," on the other hand, focuses more on one boy than an entire family. In this story, a boy entering adolescence desperately wants to be noticed by the first girl that he has become infatuated with. He thinks about her all of the time, and when she asks him if he is going to a bazaar, he is drawn there both because she describes it as something that will be enjoyable and because her association with it makes him want to attend. He promises to buy her something at the bazaar. But when he gets to the market, after waiting all day and being disappointed by his uncle, who is about as annoying to the reader as the grandmother in O'Connor's story, he ends up feeling "as a creature driven and derided by vanity" (Joyce 289). Thus, both Joyce and O'Connor's stories share similarities and differences in a number of areas. By focusing on morality and disappointment in the two stories, those similarities and differences can be explored to a greater extent.

Morality is a theme that is carried through both Joyce's and O'Connor's stories. In fact, both stories mention some type of Christian beliefs as a commonly accepted type of morality. In "A Good Man is Hard To Find," the grandmother urges The Misfit to pray over and over again at the end of the story. She insists that he is a good person and that "Jesus would help [him]" if The Misfit would just pray (193). In addition, the young boy in the story is named John Wesley, the name of a famous protestant minister. In "Araby," however, it is the Catholic religion that is emphasized. Joyce writes that Richmond Street "was a quite street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers' School set the boys free (Joyce 285). Other issues of Catholicism, such as Mangan's sister's convent and a priest, are also mentioned. Although the fact that the two stories mention different types of Christian faiths, this is more a similarity than a difference. Both stories do suggest that morality is, somehow, drawn from religion, Christian religion. Further, since O'Connor wrote from a Southern perspective and Joyce form a European perspective, both are integrating their cultures into their writing.

Differences in the treatment of morality in the novels, however, can also be found. In "A Good Man is Hard To Find," the grandmother is the character who can best be associated with the theme of morality. She is constantly referring to morality as the way that people used to act. In fact, she chastises the children for their behavior because they are not acting the way that children did when she was growing up. When the family stops at Red Sam's, she and Sam discuss the fact that "everything is getting terrible," talking about The Misfit. Further, O'Connor states that before the family leaves the restaurant, the grandmother and Red Sam talk about "better times," meaning older times (187). Clearly, for the grandmother at least, morality is measured in years. Traditions and traditional ways of doing things are considered good or moral, while modern times are considered worse than the past and immoral. At the end of the short story, it is the grandmother who is continually insisting that "The Misfit" is actually good inside, begging for him to find his own sense of morality.

"Araby," however, offers an almost opposite view of morality. While readers of "A Good Man is Hard To Find" are barraged with the grandmother's ideas of morality and instructions on how to be more moral, the main character in "Araby" practices an internal monitoring of his morality. For instance, the main character assesses the Priest who lived in the family's home as a tenant, thinking him generous because he gave away all of his possessions upon his death. Further, at the end of the story, the main character has the chance to evaluate his own morality again. Up until the end of the story, Managan's sister, the woman that he is infatuated with, has been consuming his thoughts, becoming his only morality. He thinks, speaks, and acts only for her. At the end of the story, when he is disenchanted with the bizarre, Araby, he evaluates his own morality and feels vane, his eyes "burn[ing] with anguish and anger" (Joyce 289). Thus, the main characters in these two stories are very different when it comes to morality, despite the fact that both stories discuss morality and even Christian morality. In "A Good Man is Hard to Find," it is the grandmother who preaches her morality of the past and Protestantism to anyone who will listen. In "Araby," however, the main character chooses his morality through introspection and evaluation.

In addition to the theme of morality, both "A Good Man is Hard to Find" and "Araby" share themes of disappointment. Both O'Connor's traveling family in "A Good Man is Hard to Find" and the unnamed main character in Joyce's "Araby" suffer disappointment at the end of the stories. For O'Connor's family, the disappointment is severe and shocking; they are killed. The grandmother is the one who is most seriously disappointed, as she witnesses her inability to persuade The Misfit to be good before she is disappointed by the death of her family and herself. The main character in "Araby," on the other hand, is disappointed by himself, and his childish notions of the bazaar and love. Imagining the bazaar to be a wonderfully romantic place, he is disappointed when he finds that it is filled with greed and less than idealized events. He is also disappointed when he realizes his imaginary affair with Managan's sister is, indeed, imaginary, something that Joyce implies the main character discovers while at the bazaar. Thus, disappointment is a major theme of both stories that becomes apparent at the end of the stories.