Characterization in O'Connor's "Revelation" and "A Good Man is Hard to Find"

Introduction: O'Connor's Art of Characterization

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 — prompting readers to laugh even as they recognize something of themselves — appear in Revelation and A Good Man is Hard to Find. Mrs. Turpin and the grandmother are women with extraordinary ideas about the world. O'Connor exaggerates these characters to expose the frailty of the human condition, and through them we can examine a piece of ourselves and perhaps come to realize that no one is as perfect as he or she may seem. O'Connor demonstrates the power of characterization through both of these stories.

Mrs. Turpin's Flawed Belief System in 'Revelation'

In "Revelation," Mrs. Turpin believes in her own goodness and thinks that her belief system has value. The problem is that it is unfair and deeply prejudicial. She bases a person's worth on the color of their skin or their property. She is peculiar in that she lies 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 reconciling how wealthy people "who ought to be below she and Claud" (405) fit into her scheme of things. Then she must 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; while she is close to recognizing what is wrong with her beliefs, she never quite does. Instead, she remains trapped in the same cycle of thinking.

Mrs. Turpin is also audacious. She imagines a conversation between herself and Jesus in which Jesus tells her "you can be white-trash or a nigger or ugly" (406). Here we see that she judges others by deeply 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 — in spirit — than most people she would ever encounter. She has no idea how deep her prejudice runs and, sadly, never will, because she is too busy judging everyone around her. As scholars of Southern Gothic fiction have noted, O'Connor frequently uses such self-deceived figures to satirize religious and social complacency in the American South.

The Grandmother's Self-Delusion in 'A Good Man is Hard to Find'

In "A Good Man is Hard to Find," the grandmother is another compelling character with a flawed sense of the world. She is a good person, but only on the surface. Her insistence on turning down the dirt road is precisely what leads the family into danger. She expects the family to do things her way, and she expects everyone to live by her standards. She thinks highly of herself and her heritage, telling John Wesley, "I wouldn't talk about my native state that way" (O'Connor 1938). When he replies that "Tennessee is just a hillbilly dumping ground" (1938), she retorts, "Children were more respectful of their native states and their parents and everything else. People did right then" (1938). This exchange reveals how the grandmother believes she is superior to the younger, disrespectful generation — a generation that, in her view, has lost the moral clarity her own once possessed.

This frame of mind helps us understand her naivety and gullibility when she encounters the Misfit. She attempts to reason with him and then has the audacity to ask him to pray, as if such advice would be received any better from her than from anyone else he had met in his life. His powerful reaction to her suggestion reveals that he may carry more genuine emotion on the subject than the grandmother, who believes herself to be as pious as anyone could be. She does not know the truth about the world, and she certainly does not know it about herself. O'Connor constructs the Misfit's response to the grandmother as a darkly ironic commentary on performative religiosity and the limits of surface-level goodness. The grandmother's final moment of grace, reaching out to touch the Misfit's face, has been widely read as the story's moral pivot — a point at which genuine human connection briefly transcends her lifetime of hollow self-regard.

Work Cited

O'Connor, Flannery. "A Good Man is Hard to Find." The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1981.

O'Connor, Flannery. "Revelation." Moderns and Contemporaries: Nine Masters of the Short Story. Ed. Jonathan Baumbach. New York: Random House, 1968.