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A Good Man Is Hard To Find

A Goodman Is Hard to Find   In the short story, A Goodman is Hardto Find, Flannery O’Connor writes about a grandmother that is determined to get her way. The family is planning on taking a trip to Florida, but the grandmother wants to go to Tennessee. She shows her son a newspaper article stating that, “The Misfit”, a serial killer is on the loose and is also headed toward Florida. In her failed attempt, the family goes anyway. After getting into a crash the family comes into contact with “The Misfit” and is eventually killed. This story wonderfully illustrates the point of how people can be the personification of what the world would call success of goodness and be rotten on the inside, it shows how life has a strange way of giving us what we want, and people are bad in many different ways.   This Story wonderfully illustrates the point of how people can be the personification of what the world would call success of goodness and be rotten on the inside. The grandmother looks the right way and says the right things and acts prim and proper, yet she does these things only for her own selfish gains, whimsical ideas and things she believes she wants. She says the right things and dresse the right way to appear to be a lady to the outside world. An example of this is when she thinks to herself, “In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once she was a lady.” (250) She reminisces about marring a richer man who did well in life and was not her sons father, and how she could be a coca-cola bareness. Strangers have more value in her social hierarchy than her own family. She shows this when she corrects her granddaughter for saying “I wouldn’t live in a broken down place like this for a million bucks!” (253) This example shows how she only cares about what people think of her.   Life has a strange way of giving us what we expect. When we use lies and deception for our own selfishness then we often end up with the ramifications of our own sins....

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