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A Good Man Is Hard To Find

"A Good Man is Hard to Find"
In Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find," O'Connor uses a gruesome and violent situation to reveal the true nature of her characters. In some cases, the natures of her characters are duplicitous to their initial descriptions in the first half of the story and in others, they stray very little from what is understood of them in the beginning. It can be argued that "A Good Man is Hard to Find" is duplicitous in its own right, beginning with a comical look at a manipulative, meddling grandmother and her family on what at first seems like a light-hearted story of a family road trip but that transitions into a horrific and deadly last scene (Stephens 360). At any rate, the Grandmother, Bailey and his wife, and even the Misfit are not thoroughly characterized until confronted with the last violent situation of the story. As O'Connor has stated before, "It is the extreme situation that best reveals what we are essentially" ("On Her Own Work" 340), and it is an extreme situation that in the end reveals the true depth, or lack thereof, in each of her characters.
In the first half of the story, O'Connor uses verisimilitude in her characterization of Grandmother. Like many stereotypical grandmothers, she is talkative, proper, and often reminiscent of better times…"In my time…children were more respectful…People did right then" (O'Connor 600). When it comes to women, she values all things feminine. In a sentence following the description of her dainty clothing worn for the road trip that not only characterizes Grandmothers' views on women but also foreshadows events to come, it is mentioned that "In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once she was a lady." (O'Connor 599). She is quick to correct not only her spoiled, rambunctious grandchildren but also the parenting of her son Bailey and his wife. Through an act of attempted manipulation and also more foreshadowing, she tells...