Characterization in \"Revelation\" and \"A

Characterization in "Revelation" and "A Good Man is Hard to Find"

Flannery O'Connor is famous for creating interesting characters. While some of them seem unbelievable, many are unbelievably real. Two characters that demonstrate O'Connor's ability to have fun with humanity by making readers laugh at characters are "Revelation" and "A Good Man is Hard to Find." Mrs. Turpin and the grandmother are women that have extraordinary ideas about the world. O'Connor exaggerates these characters to expose the frailty of the human condition. Through these characters, we can look at a piece of ourselves and maybe come to realize that no one is as perfect as he or she may seem. O'Connor demonstrates the power of characterization with these stories.

In "Revelation," Mrs. Turpin believes in her own goodness and thinks that her belief system has value. The problem with her belief system is it is unfair and prejudicial. She bases a person's worth on the color of their skin or their property. She is odd in that she lay in bed "naming the classes of people" (O'Connor 405). Her system, however perfect she may think it is, is flawed and she has trouble rectifying how wealthy people "who ought to be below she and Claud" (405) fir into her scheme of things. Then she has to deal with those good people who lost their money and "colored people who owned their homes and land" (405-6). Here we see a woman whose thinking is clouded and while she is close to figuring out what is wrong with what she believes, she never quiet does. Instead, she stays stuck in the same cycle of thinking. Mrs. Turpin is also audacious. She considers a conversation between her and Jesus in which Jesus tells her "you can be white-trash or a nigger or ugly" (406). Here we see that she judges by pretentious "standards." When she sees the ugly girl, she feels sorry for her but then thinks, "It was one thing to be ugly and another to act ugly" (406). This statement is important because Mrs. Turpin is uglier than most people she would ever encounter. She has no idea how deep her prejudice goes and sadly, never will because she is too busy judging other people.

In "A Good Man is Hard to Find," the grandmother is another interesting character with a flawed sense of the world. She is a good person but only on the surface. 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 herself.