Flannery O'Connor's Short Story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find"

To the Misfit, the radical message of deliveryman calls for nonpareil of two radical responses:

If He did what He verbalise, thus it's nothing for you to do exactly throw away everything and observe Him, and if He didn't, then it's nothing for you to do but admire the few minutes you got left the best way you can--by cleanup somebody or burning d feature his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness (11).

Although the Misfit does not conceive in Jesus, he lives his feel with an intense awareness of the radical choice offered by Jesus. He has consciously and agonizingly make the decision that he cannot believe and that therefore life is meaningless. The nan, on the other hand, who professes to believe, lives her life as if Jesus and his message were far less relevant or compelling than the matter of what clothes to pick out for the family's cable car trip. When the trip begins, her own death represents nothing more to the Grandmother than the possibility of having the world know she was a "lady" by the outfit she had selected (3).

The religion of the Grandmother, in other words, is hollow, meaningless, even in direct defiance of the call to radical love made by Jesus--i.e., the call to love thine enemy. She loves nobody, not even her own family, in the sense that she never forgets her own needs for one moment. She never takes seriously the thought of eternity. The Misfit has no faith, but he takes with

Brinkmeyer, Robert H., Jr. The Art & day-dream of Flannery O'Connor. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1989.

The price of be a "good woman" is living with an awareness of death. O'Connor suggests that to be truly military personnel--to be a "good man"--is to have one's mortality and one's solidarity with all human suffering (McFarland 22).

A doorway is always open to possibility and the unexpected in the human soul.

Its have-to doe with of meaning will be Christ; its center of destruction will be the devil (Brinkmeyer 20).

She saw the man's buttock twisted close to her own as if he were passage to cry and she murmured, "Why, you're one of my babies. You're one of my own children." She reached out and affected him on the shoulder. The Misfit sprang back as if a snake had bitten him and chilliness her three times through the chest (O'Connor 12).

The story focuses not on the Misfit but on the Grandmother precisely because she has so much room to change, and because she in fact does change, and radically. Her awakening symbolizes what the Catholic O'Connor herself sees as the heart and soul of Catholic fiction:

difficult seriousness the life and death of Jesus and all that credence or rejection of that life and death imply. The Misfit understands, as the Grandmother does not, what is at stake when one considers whether or not to have faith that Jesus was who He said He was and that He did what others said He did--especially, in the Misfit's view, the raising of the dead.

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