A Good Man Is Hard to Find, by Flannery O’Connor

Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories is a collection of stories that combines the local culture of O’Connor’s native Georgia with universal themes of human mature and God’s redeeming grace.  It exemplifies O’Connor’s characteristically vivid imagery, shallow characters, religious allusions, and expert use of dialogue and story structure – all of which she uses to produce unexpected, almost absurd but powerful moments of redemption and humanity.  This depth and complexity make the book worth reading, but more for intellectual than entertainment purposes.

“A Good Man Is Hard to Find”

            Flannery O’Connor’s story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” recounts a middle-class Georgia family’s encounter with an escaped criminal on a deserted country road while on a trip to Florida.  Despite the characters’ moral flaws (emphasized by their lack of development) and the inevitably fatal outcome of the experience, the story contains an equally powerful ray of redemption and humanity.  O’Connor pulls this off in several ways.  First, she works with and around the characters’ flatness to bring out what is redeemable in them.  By limiting characterization largely to physical appearances and actions, and so emphasizing their spiritual shallowness, she sets the reader up to regard anything more as almost literally a miracle.  She then uses strategic dialogue to provide such miracles, building the entire high event around a conversation between the grandmother and the convict in which they discuss Christ and in which the grandmother finally claims their shared identity as fallen human beings in need of grace with the statement that the Misfit is “one of [her] own children”.

            O’Connor also uses a very unified story structure and powerful imagery to highlight this effect.  She introduces the conflict immediately with a very direct first sentence (“The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida”) and within just a few paragraphs has acquainted the reader with the dysfunctional dynamics of the family and connected them to the Misfit.  She also drops small details into the first few pages that at first glance are merely characterization but in retrospect foreshadow key points of the high event.  Finally, while the characters are spiritually lacking, their physical descriptions and the descriptions of their surroundings are very precise.  This strength of structure and description lend the story’s events more power and make the characters more concrete and memorable for the reader.

 

“Good Country People”

            “Good Country People” is the story of a self-made intellectual’s confrontation with a Bible salesman who, it turns out, shares her atheism but takes it in an entirely different, morally depraved direction.  O’Connor handles characterization in such a way that the shock of this discovery and its aftermath is magnified for the reader.  The Bible salesman’s innocent façade – his youth, his heart trouble, his pushiness about selling the Hopewells a Bible, his childlike admiration for Hulga – is emphasized so that the worst the reader can initially suspect him of is possibly swindling Mrs. Hopewell or stealing the silverware.  Even when he meets Hulga for a “picnic” in the stable loft, this emphasis, combined with a lack of access to his inner thoughts, makes him seem affected by nothing more than clueless infatuation.  By contrast, Hulga’s inner world is given unusually extensive coverage, exposing her keen intelligence and sense of intellectual superiority, so that she is the one who seems most capable of calculated malice.  With the revealing of what the salesman really has in his suitcase and his treatment of Hulga’s artificial leg, however, O’Connor turns this perception upside down so that the reader is as shocked as Hulga.  This shock is compounded by the factual, understated way in which the suitcase’s contents and the salesman’s behavior are described.

            Yet here as elsewhere O’Connor uses dialogue to offer a glimpse of humanity and even a sense of relief.  Hulga’s repeated pleas for the return of her leg in the face of the salesman’s deception signal her progress towards realizing her human vulnerability in spite of her intellectual refinement.  The salesman’s own heated and apparently sincere protest that the atheism he assumed they shared was the very basis for his actions also relieves tge reacder and Hulga of their confusion with an ironic twist of expectations.  These moments allow the reader a clear view of the characters and their situation – and, for Hulga at least, offer the characters a clearer view of themselves.  Set alongside the shocking details of the high event, they are made all the more forceful and carry a miraculous quality.  And so, even though Hulga is ultimately left in the hayloft without her prized possession and means of getting back to the house, the reader nonetheless takes from the story a kind of hope.

“A Circle in the Fire”

            “A Circle in the Fire” relates the miseries of a small-farm owner on whose property a group of three boys insist on staying past their welcome.  The story makes good use of the writer/reader contract, a circular story structure, and foreshadowing.  The first sentences introduce the woods and Mrs. Cope’s fear of their burning, and early on it makes biblical allusions, alerting the reader to religious themes.  Its conclusion returns to these details with the burning of the woods and the comparison of the boys to a group of biblical characters kept safe in the midst of a fiery furnace.  In between, it builds tension through suspense, keeping the point of view to a limited third-person and revealing only what Mrs. Cope’s daughter knows or witnesses.  Here again, little is told of the characters’ deepest thoughts and motives.  The high event is counter-intuitive – the fire remains distant, the hired help is sluggish  in addressing it, and the boys take joy in the destruction – and leaves enough of its outcome unsaid to make the reader wonder not only about the boys’ and the Copes’ fate but also their spiritual state at the end.  Thus, there is not as strong a sense of salvation as there was in the aforementioned stories.   This uncertainty makes the story somewhat less powerful in its impact on the reader.  The presence of a few details in places of significance that ultimately are not relatable to the high event also took away from the story’s direction early on, creating ambiguity that was better reserved for the already uncertain end.

 

An extensive site on O’Connor featuring bio, list of works by and about O’Connor, and links to more resources: http://mediaspecialist.org/index.html

An interesting site about O’Connor’s home: http://andalusiafarm.org/andalusia/andalusia.htm

Where to find her books: Amazon, Books-A-Million, Walmart, Cokesbury, Barnes and Noble….