Comparing themes of Flannery O Connors A Good Man Is Hard To Find and Good Country People

O'Connor Themes

The Impulse to Objectify and the Startling Nature of God: Themes in the Works of Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O'Connor is one of the most widely-read twentieth century American authors of short-form fiction, and with good reason. While depicting what appear for the most part to be normal, every-day, and even dreary characters in settings that are generally just as commonplace, O'Connor still manages to impart a decidedly mythic element to her characters and the events that befall them. It is not simply that the actions that take place in her short stories are ultimately life-altering for the characters involved, regardless of how mundane the stories are at the outset, but rather that the very normality of the mundane details takes on a heightened importance in the context of the story's events, with many of the larger themes of life and literature -- especially Western literature -- evoked in even the simplest of her works.

Two of the themes dealt with in many of O'Connor's short stories are those of the startling, surprising, and often frightening recognition of God in an everyday life, and of the human need to compartmentalize and categorize the people and things around us even when such actions are inaccurate and even harmful. Put simply, these themes are the recognition of God and the objectification of human beings, and both of them are highly important elements in Flannery O'Connor's works, and in many other works of fiction. O'Connor's stories, however, also have a sense of fatalistic disaster and a definite appreciation for the macabre that gives them a complexity of meaning and action that is at times difficult to parse.

This is certainly the case with her short stories "A Good Man is Hard to Find" and "Good Country People," both of which begin rather innocently and end in ways that are anything but, showing at once the complete fallibility and ridiculousness of human impulses and beliefs as well as the un-guessed-at nature of God in everyday life. An exploration of both of these themes in the two short stories provides a clearer (though far from entirely certain) view of how O'Connor viewed the world and understood its workings, or at least presented them in her fiction. The murders that make up the end of "A Good Man is Hard to Find" and the near-rape with which "Good Country People" culminates both demonstrate the violence of God's revelation of Himself to man, as O'Connor sees it, while also serving to encapsulate two rather extreme examples of the complete impotence of human classifications and beliefs in the face of the ongoing progress of fate.

Finding the Good (God) in Man

In "A Good Man is Hard to Find," O'Connor presents a family consisting of a rather annoying grandmother, her son and his wife and their three children, all on a road trip to Florida. Turning down a dirt road at the grandmother's instigation, the family ends up falling into the clutches of The Misfit and his two partners in crime, all recently escaped from a federal penitentiary. Though soft-spoken and strangely philosophical, The Misfit is also quite cold blooded, ordering the murder of the entire family in a certain but polite way, and eventually killing the grandmother himself in what appears to be a knee-jerk reaction to her reaching out to him.

In many ways, The Misfit can and should be viewed as a type of Jesus figure, cast out of the rest of society and with a specific message about life and its meaning that he is trying to bring to the world. He is a highly startling mage of God, and once he is recognized by man there is no turning away from him. In one sense, the grandmother's "recognition" of The Misfit as "one of [her] own children" evokes his image as a sort of reverse Christ figure -- just as all are God's children, in a Christian context, The Misfit is recognized as a sort of universal child -- and also provides her with a "moment of grace" that ultimately redeems her, according to some interpretations (O'Connor; Curley 31). Though startling and in fact terrifying, then, it is only this direct appearance of God -- symbolically, at least -- in the grandmother's life that leads to her salvation. As The Misfit says, "She would of been a good woman…if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life'" (O'Connor).

In an interpretation that requires less reliance on the doctrinal beliefs held to be true in O'Connor's fictive worlds and likely held by the author herself as a staunch Catholic, the grandmother can be seen as responsible not only for the death of her family but even for the creation of The Misfit himself (Renner). The very concepts of good and bad and the need to classify everyone -- a need that the grandmother demonstrates throughout the brief story -- are directly responsible for the creation of misfits in society, and The Misfit is no exception. By objectifying both individuals and their behaviors and morality, the grandmother is responsible for creating the very notion of evil, and her inability to correctly categorize places her and her family in danger (Renner).

Bibles and Thumping

The same type of mistaken objectification takes place in an even more explicit manner in the second of O'Connor's works discussed here, "Good Country People." In this story, a young man purporting to travel the countryside selling Bibles catches the eye of a cynical woman with a philosophy doctorate but who otherwise acts much like her mother's adolescent daughter, living at home in the rural South with no plans to really change that due to her "weak heart" and the fact that she has an artificial leg beginning at the knee. The young man's seeming innocence entices Joy, who has legally changed her name to Hulga, and she imagines seducing him and the ways in which she will have to help him recover from the seduction. In the end, however, he manages to seduce her and ultimately steals her leg as a curiosity, or perhaps simply as something to sell somewhere else in his travels.

The abruptness of the tale's ending, like that of "A Good Man is Hard to Find," is in large part responsible for the strength of the story's impact and its ultimate meaning. Once the realization has been made that an incorrect assumption or classification of an individual has been made -- that they have been objectified in a way that is not only incomplete, but is in fact grossly inaccurate -- the story moves forward very quickly. In this story, Joy/Hulga herself becomes objectified and even objectifies herself in terms of her leg, which she uses to define herself and which is the ultimate object of lust for the young man (Mayer). She both incorrectly objectifies the young man and fails to recognize her self-objectification until it is too late.