Paraphrase techniques and applications

Flannery O'Connor

Education: Reading

Paraphrase

Instructions:

The following assignment is based on your reading of Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find" (OCR pp. 249-261) and on Claire Katz's critical essay, "The Function of Violence in O'Connor's Fiction" (OCR p. 263). (You can also find this assignment in Literature to Go (OCR) p. 263. Click on the highlight "Considerations.")?

Answer question #2: To what extent might "A Good Man is Hard to Find" be accurately described as a story "in which a character attempts to live autonomously, to define…values, only to be jarred back to…'reality' -- the recognition of helplessness in the face of contingency…" (paragraph 2)? Format: Write your response in standard essay style. DO INLCUDE a separate Works Cited page. Use either MLA or APA style.

To what extent might "A Good Man is Hard to Find" be accurately described as a story "in which a character attempts to live autonomously, to define…values, only to be jarred back to…'reality' -- the recognition of helplessness in the face of contingency…"? (Katz 263). This comment on O'Connor's fiction by Claire Katz is intended as a generalization about O'Connor's work as a whole, but it is an almost perfect description of what happens in the difficult ending of O'Connor's story "A Good Man is Hard to Find." O'Connor's story leans heavily upon the word "good" in the title, because the good man in this story is, of course, someone who would normally be described as the opposite of good, a criminal and a murderer. Yet this criminal's encounter with an elderly grandmother in O'Connor's story is intended to reverse our traditional associations of what qualifies as "good" or "evil" -- in some sense, the "bad guy" in this story has an innate sense of good, while the grandmother only achieves her goodness at the barrel of a gun.

As the story begins, O'Connor seems to be giving us purely a character sketch of the grandmother -- one which includes heavy doses of casual racism (like her cat named after a comic Japanese stereotype from "The Mikado" or her unthinking use of the n-word in conversation) and a great deal of passive-aggressive manipulation. For example, she attempts to surreptitiously get her way about stopping in Tennessee en route to Florida by trying to enlist the children with a clearly fictional story about silver treasure hidden behind a secret panel. But what seems like it will be a relatively comic story about an awful grandmother is suddenly derailed by a minor automobile accident and a chance encounter. The chance encounter is, of course, with the criminal who is referred to in the first sentence of the story: an escaped convict known as "The Misfit" who has escaped from a Federal Penitentiary and is supposedly on the loose in the area of Florida they will be driving through.

The difficulty, of course, comes when the grandmother cannot help pointing out the identity of the driver of the other car in their car accident. If she had thought it through she might have known that demonstrating knowledge for its own sake can be a vice (as a form of pride in knowing more or feeling superior) and that in some sense it is her very character flaws which have now doomed her and her family to an instant death. The grandmother, however, will be the last to die -- which indicates some mercy on the part of the Misfit, as he engages her in serious conversation about Jesus Christ. What is lurking over this entire conversation is the story of the two thieves crucified alongside Jesus, one of whom is granted an instantaneous trip to paradise. The Misfit is revealed as a man who has wrestled with his own conscience for his entire life: he is clearly in need of forgiveness. The grandmother, by contrast, is smug in her sense of self-righteousness -- it never occurs to her that her petty viciousness (the casual racism, the manipulation of her family) might be an indication that she is not as good as she pretends to be.