A Good Man Is Hard to Find (short story)

"A Good Man Is Hard to Find"
Short story by Flannery O'Connor
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Southern Gothic, short story, dialogue
Publication
Published in	Modern Writing I
Publication type	Short story collection
Publisher	Avon
Media type	Print
Publication date	1953

"A Good Man Is Hard to Find" is a Southern gothic short story first published in 1953 by author Flannery O'Connor who, in her own words, described it as "the story of a family of six which, on its way driving to Florida [from Georgia], gets wiped out by an escaped convict who calls himself the Misfit"." The brutal murder of an entire family shocks readers to this day.

The story remains the most anthologized and most well-known of all of O'Connor's works even with its enigmatic conclusion that involves a dialogue between a serial killer, tormented by the suffering of mankind and himself for what he considers the injustices in both secular and divine laws, and a superficial, mischievous, morally-flawed, Methodist grandmother dressed as an old fashioned Southern lady. She stumbles into a way that makes The Misfit doubt what he is doing just for the moment before he murders her, and in pity for his torments, she demonstrates in an act of mercy that all good Christian mothers, like God, love all God's children no matter what the children do.

The story is a black comedy in which a killer, a former undertaker, demonstrates he knows more than "A Time for Everything", the poem that begins the Book of Ecclesiastes chapter 3, by alluding to the looming death Qoheleth said comes to all in Ecclesiastes 12:1 — "evil days come and the years draw near of which you will say, 'I have no pleasure in them'". The weary mass murderer seems to have enough sense to know he will someday be caught by the Authorities and be executed — an "eye for an eye" that seems to fit, rather than misfit, his own notion of just punishment. The man familiar with Ecclesiastes would know that his rebellion is folly being realized as prophecy written as an aphorism by its author, who claimed to be King Solomon, in Ecclesiastes 10:8:

"He who digs a pit will fall into it, and a serpent will bite him who breaks through a wall."

Publication history

"A Good Man Is Hard to Find" was first published in 1953 in the multi-author short story anthology Modern Writing I published by Avon. The story appears in her own collection of short stories A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories published in 1955 by Harcourt. In 1960, it was included in the anthology The House of Fiction, published by Charles Scribner's Sons, and later included in numerous other short story collections.

An anagogical vision for a total picture

"A Good Man Is Hard to Find" is an example of the author's "anagogical vision" aimed to express realities, beyond symbolism, to convey the meanings of her work. For example, the sun is more than a symbol of God, it is God as a character that is never directly seen in the dispirited world of the story. As another example, a large part of the total meaning of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" is its relationships with the New Testament story of Jesus and the Rich Young Man and the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes from dramatic, comedic, moral, and theological perspectives.

In her essay, "The Nature and Aim of Fiction", O'Conner described her goals for writing fiction. The essay is useful for helping readers understand how to approach and interpret her works. One of her major goals in writing was to construct elements of her fiction so they can be interpreted anagogically — her "anagogical vision":

"The kind of vision the fiction writer needs to have, or to develop, in order to increase the meaning of his story is called anagogical vision, and that is the kind of vision that is able to see different levels of reality in one image or one situation. The medieval commentators on Scripture found three kinds of meaning in the literal level of the sacred text: one they called allegorical, in which one fact pointed to another; one they called tropological, or moral, which had to do with what should be done; and one they called anagogical, which had to do with the Divine life and our participation in it. Although this was a method applied to exegesis, it was also an attitude toward all of creation, and a way of reading nature... ."

Peter M. Chandler, Jr., summarized O'Connor's vision for readers — that all of the interpretations of her work are rooted in its literal sense: "...[F]or O'Connor, the literal in some sense already "contains" the figurative. Far from being a level of meaning superadded to the literal sense, the 'spiritual sense' is already inherent in any attempt to render something artistically. 'A good story,' she wrote, 'is literal in the same sense a child's drawing is literal.'" In other words, O'Connor understood that her anagogical vision is a challenge to readers because they must not only understand the literal story but also associate the literal with their knowledge or experience. Consequently, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" is enriched beyond its literal narrative when the literal can be related to biblical, Christian, Roman Catholic, Protestant, Southern society and its history, and other subjects.

The literal sense of the story's title and The Misfit's complaint, "If He [Jesus] did what He said, then it's nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him" both appear in a more constructive context in the New Testament story of Jesus and the Rich Young Man suggest searches for the deeper meanings of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" might start there. At readings O'Connor offered suggestions about her intent at the literal level, such as for a 1963 reading at a Southern college with a highly respected creative writing program — Hollins College in Roanoke, Virginia:

"I don't have any pretensions to being an Aeschylus or Sophocles and providing you in this story with a cathartic experience out of your mythic background, though this story I'm going to read certainly calls up a good deal of the South's mythic background, and it should elicit from you a degree of pity and terror, even though its way of being serious is a comic one. I do think, though, that like the Greeks you should know what is going to happen in this story so that any element of suspense in it will be transferred from its surface to its interior."

Epigraph

An example of the effect of O'Connor's anagogical vision is an epigraph she wrote for "A Good Man Is Hard to Find". The epigraph was published only for the paperback Three by Flannery O'Connor that also included her two novels Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away, that first appeared in September 1964, a month after her death, and eleven years after the short story was first published. The epigraph was probably included in compliance with her wishes upon her death. The epigraph reads:

"'The dragon is by the side of the road, watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you. We go to the father of souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon.' — St. Cyril of Jerusalem."

The literal sense of the epigraph is the impression it has on readers unacquainted with Cyril of Jerusalem's Procatechesis from which O'Connor extracted it. As the story opens with a family's plan to drive to Florida for a vacation and is warned about a criminally-violent escaped prison convict heading in the same direction, the epigraph foreshadows the possibility of the family's encounter with life-threatening violence since going to "the father of souls" alludes to death. When the reader encounters The Misfit, the convict appears to be the figurative dragon, a symbol for evil and danger.

For readers acquainted with Procatechesis and the introduction of the boy, John Wesley, named for the Methodist theologian, the dragon represents one's own moral proclivities that can derail the baptized Christian's lifetime efforts toward achieving salvation after death. To these readers, the epigraph leaves the impression that the story is a tale about Christian characters, including The Misfit, about the moral choices made within and prior to the story's events that affect their prospect for salvation. The story only serves to focus on a highlight on a path toward salvation. With respect to St. Cyril's dragon in the tropological (moral) sense and The Misfit in the literal sense, when the reader encounters The Misfit, a gospel singer turned killer, he is a character already devoured by St. Cyril's dragon given his communications with God and rejection of Jesus as savior. The grandmother's murder is her destruction by The Misfit as a metaphorical dragon in the literal sense, but tropologically, she performs a redemptive act at her end that allows her to pass by St. Cyril's dragon. O'Connor's rewording of the item in Procatechesis can be viewed as her effort to introduce literal and tropological realities that can coexist concurrently throughout her story.

O'Connor used the epigraph to close her essay "The Fiction Writer and His Country" that was published in 1957 in the book The Living Novel: A Symposium, a book of statements by novelists on their art, where she followed the epigraph with the closing sentence: "No matter what form the dragon may take, it is of this mysterious passage past him, or his jaws, that stories of any depth will always be concerned to tell, and this being the case, it requires considerable courage at any time, in any place, not to turn away from the story teller." The statement indicates how O'Connor wanted her works read and for the reader to look for the dragon in her short story collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories that includes at least nine of its ten stories about original sin.

The epigraph was derived from item 16 of the Prologue of Cyril of Jerusalem's Procatechesis, a Catechetical lecture drafted during the fourth century. Item 16 describes the importance of baptism and identifies a serpent that lies in wait to attack the baptized, encounters that lead to spiritual impediments to one's salvation. Individuals have the responsibility to guard their own soul against the serpent's attacks in order to stay on the metaphorical path toward salvation that began with baptism, including having "your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace", a reference to Ephesians 6:15, that is part of the "whole armor of God" Christians are suggested to wear to "be able to stand against the schemes of the devil" (Ephesians 6:11). The item reads:

"Great is the Baptism that lies before you: a ransom to captives; a remission of offenses; a death of sin; a new-birth of the soul; a garment of light; a holy indissoluble seal; a chariot to heaven; the delight of Paradise; a welcome into the kingdom; the gift of adoption! But there is a serpent by the wayside watching those who pass by: beware lest he bite you with unbelief. He sees so many receiving salvation, and is seeking whom he may devour. You are coming in unto the Father of Spirits, but you are going past that serpent. How then may you pass him? Have your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace; that even if he bite, he may not hurt you. Have faith in-dwelling, stedfast hope, a strong sandal, that you may pass the enemy, and enter the presence of your Lord. Prepare your own heart for reception of doctrine, for fellowship in holy mysteries. Pray more frequently, that God may make you worthy of the heavenly and immortal mysteries. Cease not day nor night: but when sleep is banished from your eyes, then let your mind be free for prayer. And if you find any shameful thought rise up in your mind, turn to meditation upon Judgment to remind you of Salvation. Give your mind wholly to study, that it may forget base things. If you find any one saying to you, Are you then going in, to descend into the water? Has the city just now no baths? Take notice that it is the dragon of the sea who is laying these plots against you. Attend not to the lips of the talker, but to God who works in you. Guard your own soul, that thou be not ensnared, to the end that abiding in hope you may become an heir of everlasting salvation."

Plot

Bailey, the head of an Atlanta household, prepares to take his family on a vacation to Florida. His mother (known only as "the grandmother" throughout the story) warns Bailey that a convict called The Misfit has escaped from prison and is heading towards Florida. She suggests a trip to East Tennessee instead; a proposal Bailey ignores. Her grandson, John Wesley, comments that his grandmother could stay in Atlanta; her granddaughter, June Star, rudely says “she wouldn’t stay at home to be queen for a day;” and her infant grandchild is tended to by her daughter-in-law. When they leave the next morning, the grandmother occupies the backseat of the family's car, dressed so that if she is killed in an accident, she can be recognized as a Southern "lady." She hides the family's cat, Pitty Sing, in a basket between her legs, not wanting to leave it home alone.

While traveling, the grandmother points out scenery in Georgia. Her grandchildren respond by berating both Georgia and Tennessee, and the grandmother reminds them that in her day, “children were more respectful of their native states and their parents and everything else." She delights in seeing a naked black child waving from a shack, finding the image quaint. The grandmother later sees a graveyard which was once part of a plantation that she jokingly says has "Gone with the Wind". She tells her three grandchildren that when she was a "maiden lady," she had been "courted" by a man who, as an early owner of Coca Cola stock, died wealthy.

The family stops for barbeque at The Tower Restaurant after passing a series of billboards proclaiming the restaurant and food as "famous" and the proprietor, Red Sammy Butts, as "the fat boy with the happy laugh." On arrival, the family finds that the place is somewhat rundown. Red Sammy easily charms the grandmother, but is rather scornful of his wife, a mistrustful waitress who worries about being robbed by The Misfit. The grandmother promptly declares Red Sammy "a good man," and the two reminisce about better times while lamenting the decay of values.

Later that afternoon, the family continues on in the car before the grandmother falsely remembers a plantation being in the area, only realizing her mistake after Bailey takes a turn, at her instruction, down a rocky dirt road surrounded by wilderness. The pang of this error causes her to disturb the cat, who leaps onto Bailey, who loses control of the car, and the automobile flips over into a ditch. No one is seriously hurt, but the accident is witnessed by a party of three strange men-- one of whom the grandmother recognizes as The Misfit. She announces this, and consequently, The Misfit has his men lead Bailey, the children's mother, and the children off into the woods where they are shot and killed. The grandmother confusedly pleads for her life, beseeching The Misfit to find solace by praying to Jesus Christ; who The Misfit blames for his troubles and the dismal state of the world.

Finally, upon seeing The Misfit's face twisted with despair, the grandmother, in a moment of clarity, reaches out and takes him by the shoulder, gently claiming him as "one of her babies." Just then, The Misfit shoots her to death. When his companions return, The Misfit says that the grandmother "would've been a good woman if it were someone there to shoot her every minute of her life," and seems to conclude that violence affords "no real pleasure in life."

Characters

Summary

Superficiality as a character theme

Flannery O'Connor said her craft involved realization of a "prophetic vision" where the "prophecy" is "a matter of seeing near things with their extensions of meaning and thus of seeing far things close up". The story's characters are one of the "near things" and one of the "far things" brought up close is the superficiality of the lives and interactions between a grandmother and her family used for humorous, dramatic, and thematic effects. Robert C. Evans observed:

"As its very title already suggests, 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find' (like much of O'Connor's fiction) is very much concerned with satirizing stale and clichéd uses of language. The characters who use clichés ... are all characters who tend to speak (and, more importantly, to think) in highly conventional and unoriginal ways. When O'Connor's characters mouth clichés ... that is a sign that they have ceased to think for themselves, if in fact they ever possessed any original thoughts to begin with."

Compared to the superficiality of the family that engages itself in comic books, television quiz shows (e.g., "Queen for a Day"), movies, and the newspaper's sport section, an original thought, often a dark truth like Red Sammy Butt's wife saying nobody on earth can be trusted "And I don't count nobody out of that, no nobody" looking at her husband, has both comic and dramatic affects on the reader. Evans noted, "A major purpose of the story will be to shake most of the characters, ... as well as O'Connor's readers, out of [a] kind of smug complacency."

God and the religious life of Bailey's household

Shallowness as a character theme is also reflected in the appearance of God, portrayed as the Sun in her stories. No character in the story sees the Sun directly. Sunlight casts the story's world of modern America as a superficial, spiritless place, where the only trace of the Sun is the indistinct bright glary haze of daylight that is "beautiful" on a cloudless day to the grandmother. The image is God being viewed as a pervasive bright yet obscure feeling rather than the brilliant, distinct object defined in the human mind by Christian doctrines.

The grandmother throughout the story, longingly refers to her past and only things in the present that remind her of her younger days. As her son drives she points to objects that existed during her youth: "Stone Mountain; the blue granite that in some places came up to both sides of the highway; the brilliant red clay banks slightly streaked with purple; and the various crops that made rows of green lace-work on the ground." The narration then adds an image of looming danger that is ignored: "The trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled." From the grandmother's perspective, the image alludes to the phrase "nothing new under the sun" in Ecclesiastes chapter 1 that reflects the spiritual weariness that also appears as superficiality of the Methodist grandmother: "What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun." (Ecclesiastes 1:9)

The absence of the Sun corresponds to the absence of Christian life in Bailey's household that is reflected in the story's opening on a day children read the funny papers on Bailey reads the color-printed sports section — a Sunday, on which it appears the family did not attend church or Sunday school. Also, the story's narration on the lives of Bailey and his family is absent of any religious thoughts or practices which is significant to any story by an author known for her focus on the spiritual lives of her characters. However, the naming of the eight-year-old son for Methodist theologian John Wesley, suggests religious activity was then more vigorous. The naming of the seven-year-old daughter as June Star, a name with Christian, pagan, and secular connotations, suggests a diminishing influence of religion in family life in only one year. After seven more years, formal religious practices within the household have completely stopped.

Bailey and his family

Bailey

Bailey is the bald head of an Atlanta, Georgia middle class, intergenerational household with a wife; three young children — John Wesley, June Star, and an unnamed baby; and his mother, who is referred to as "grandmother" throughout the story. Bailey crashes the family's car on a three-day family trip to Florida after he diverges from his travel plan when he gives in to his mother's and children's wishes to visit an old plantation his mother said she visited when she was a "young lady". Bailey exerts little control over his unruly, disrespectful children and gives in to their demand to stop at the plantation when his mother entices his children with the idea that the plantation house has a secret hiding place the owner used to hide his family silver from General William Tecumseh Sherman during his March to the Sea. Bailey tolerates his mother's gabbiness and nagging. He is the first member of the family to be murdered by the Misfit's accomplices.

Given his son's name, John Wesley, Bailey and his family likely regard themselves as Methodists. The grandmother's shouting of "Pray!" and "Jesus!" recall the revivalist practices of Methodism that has the intensity of undermining The Misfit's confidence. However, the family appears to be Methodists in name only, as indicated by the lack of any religious thoughts or practices among them, including his mother, and the absence of saying grace before their meal at The Tower restaurant. In particular, the church-centered social life of Southern ladies that exists even in current-day Atlanta is entirely absent from the grandmother's life. O'Connor described both the grandmother and her killer as people "cut off from Grace". Given that the social environment of a church community is essential to a genteel Southern lady's life, the lack of religion in Bailey's household suggests an argument about church-going and church-life the mother had and lost against her son. The argument may have been repeated if the grandmother suggested her grandchildren attend Sunday school. The deprivation would have lingered in the grandmother's memory.

Bailey's name alludes to Jack Bailey, the host of the radio and television game show "Queen for a Day" that ran from 1945 to 1964. "Queen for a day" is a phrase used by Bailey's daughter to describe his mother. Given the format for the game show, Bailey's game host persona is to receive his mother's daily tales about life's adversities and her contemporary complaints that are overhead by the entire family.

While Bailey yells obscenities to his mother for telling The Misfit that she recognized him as the escaped convict described in her newspaper, the story's narration implicitly recognizes divine praise (an example of being a good man) for Bailey's care of his widowed mother. The family's stop at The Tower outside of Timothy, Georgia alludes to Paul the Apostle's guidelines for the church of Ephesus on its support for the welfare of widows like in First Epistle to Timothy contained in 1 Timothy 5:3-16. For the purpose of church support for an elderly widow, the church's policy is to provide none, as the expectation is that a widow's children or grandchildren will care for her: "... if a widow has children or grandchildren, let them first learn to show godliness to their own household and to make some return to their parents, for this is pleasing in the sight of God." (1 Timothy 5:4)

Bailey's mother

Bailey's mother is the protagonist of the story, a woman who seems content with a comfortable life surrounded by family. She is, presumably, a widow. The narrator refers to her as "grandmother" (always with a small "g") and "old lady", and a "young lady" as she recalls a plantation home near her native Tennessee home. One of her flaws is her over-confidence in that she reacts spontaneously and vociferously by speaking before assessing the implications or even accuracy of what she has spoken. Her granddaughter likens her to "queen for a day", a comment by a cynical brat covering the grandmother's tales of adversity and complaints, the female winner on the game show with the same title who was most successful, as measured by an audience applause meter, in portraying adversity in her life.

The central conflict of the story is between the grandmother and The Misfit, her killer, in a dialogue that occurs while Bailey, his wife and children are shot in the woods not far from the two characters. Her ideal, reflected in her appearance, is that of a genteel Southern “lady", an ideal she cannot realize given the unruly, modern city family she lives with. Her virtuosity as a good person is reflected as her being a Christian having "good blood", a distinction her killer finds abhorrent.

Matthew Day characterizes characters like the grandmother as the author's portrayal of people who conform with the Southern ideal of manners in their appearance, behavior, and a contributor towards their moral corruption:

"For the White women who populate this fictional landscape the Southern code of manners reserves a kind of pre-articulate, vernacular model of feminine virtue that might be called 'gracious living.' ... Gracious living is a particular kind of moral sensibility, an ethos that is expressed by the "habits of choice" that her characters manifest in every domain of their lives. Manners are, in other words, the embodiment of the Southern woman’s moral life."

The grandmother's appearance exemplifies a habit of a gracious Southern lady that requires a large piece of luggage to sustain. She longs for the agrarian South of her younger days, including plantations, relationships with young men, and impoverished black people. Her fantasies about Civil War plantation life of her parent's generation triggers the diversion of the family road trip towards their extermination.

While the grandmother is more than nostalgic for the South of her younger years, she still believes in the political and economic principles and social structure of the Old South — state's rights reflected in her scolding John Wesley for disparaging Georgia and Tennessee; oppressed as the fitting state for black Americans reflected in her admiration for the image of a destitute black child; and kinship as the basis for social status and power or what she calls "good blood" that is not "common", respectively.

The habits of the grandmother's ideal of a Southern lady is incompatible with the suburban lifestyle of a modern city that is expanding and becoming wealthier as a result of the post-World War II economic expansion. She has become a misfit with her family. Her son, Bailey, likely a World War II veteran, and his wife appear common — typically suburban, and not the Southern gentleman and lady that give the appearance of kinship with a Southern family with "good blood". Her failure to mold her family to her ideals suggest disappointment. The lack of any reference to religion or church in the story suggests a decision to preclude them from their lives and, given the church-centered social life of a Southern lady, an intra-family argument the grandmother lost. Her husband and thoughts of him as a young man are absent from her longings for the past and her musing about Edgar Atkins Teagarden as a lost marriage opportunity suggests that she once had a much grander vision of social status than realized by the toil of her husband.

The old lady's grandchildren can complain about her presence on their trip and everywhere else because she doesn't serve as a moral or disciplinary authority. The children can ignore her without consequence; and the grandmother is adept at undermining and disrespecting Bailey and his wife as the children are, reaching its pinnacle on the Florida trip with her taking the cat on as a stowaway and the mistaken adventure to the east Tennessee plantation house in Georgia.

On the road to Florida, she admires a graveyard amid a cotton field while holding her infant grandchild in her lap, and thinks of it nostalgically rather than triggering contemplation of her own mortality. O'Connor characterized her, from a Catholic point of view, as a woman not spiritually prepared to face death: "The heroine of this story, the Grandmother, is in the most significant position life offers the Christian. She is facing death. And to all appearances she, like the rest of us, is not too well prepared for it. She would like to see the event postponed. Indefinitely." The Catholic theological event O'Connor referred to is God's Particular Judgment of the grandmother's soul immediately after death.

Bailey's wife

Bailey's wife is a nearly speechless woman described as having a face that was "as broad and innocent as a cabbage." She is not identified by name, only as "the children's mother." Throughout the story she cares for an infant. Much like her husband, not much is revealed about the mother. Like her husband, she does little to discipline her children. In the car accident, she is throw out of the car and breaks her shoulder. Her injury doesn't receive the attention of any character.

Bailey's children

Bailey's children are John Wesley and June Star, aged eight and seven, respectively, two brats — rowdy and disrespectful. Their self-centeredness is so extreme that they are never aware that their mother, thrown out of the moving car during the accident, has a broken shoulder. They have learned to manipulate their parents by screaming and yelling at them, behavior the grandmother has learned to initiate in order to manipulate and undermine their parents. Their behavior suggests a continuation of the disappearance of traditional Southern manners that their hypocritical grandmother regards as ideals — respect for parents and elders, discipline, and allegiance to one's home state.

John Wesley's namesake is the eighteenth century Protestant theologian John Wesley, who helped establish the principle doctrines of Methodism, and who was inspired by the practices of members of the Moravian Church among Georgian colonists, which suggests the family regards themselves as Methodists. The boy, as well as his sister, appear to have little understanding of Methodism or John Wesley's relevance to Georgia as he declares his home state "lousy" and suggests to his father driving the family car: “Let’s go through Georgia fast so we won’t have to look at it much."

June Star is likely named for Polaris, the North Star, that is especially prominent during the month of June. The North Star's position in the night sky is useful in navigation and is regarded as a "guiding light" symbolizing Jesus as a spiritual and moral guide. As the "Pole Star", Polaris also symbolizes God in that all other stars in the sky viewed in the Northern Hemisphere revolve around it, though as a metaphor, June Star enjoys being the center of attention, and with her dancing display at a restaurant, her "star" nature is more aligned with show business than with nature or religion. The character's disrespect for everyone runs so deep that she denounces the man that holds the gun that will kill her together with her mother and infant sibling and has already killed her father and brother.

Pitty Sing

Pitty Sing is the pet cat of Baily's family. Its name might be Southern slang for "pretty thing" or the namesake for Pitti-Sing young female character from the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, The Mikado, who is falsely blamed with her siblings for the execution of another character. The cat causes Bailey to drive his car off the road and crash, and after the accident, Bailey throws it at a tree, which it survives unscathed. After Bailey and his family are murdered, The Misfit returns the cat's affection for his leg by picking it up, the sole demonstration of his affection for any living creature in the story — an image of evil and innocence.

Characters at The Tower restaurant

Bailey and his family stop at The Tower restaurant outside Timothy, Georgia for lunch, where they appear to be the only customers. The Tower premises includes a gas station and dance hall. Red Sammy Butts runs the operation, and is the apparent owner, as signage along the highway mentions the "famous", "veteran", "fat boy with the happy laugh" Red Sammy by name along with his "famous barbecue". The family's encounter with Red Sammy and The Tower is nothing like what was advertised. The family is seated in an empty restaurant attended by the fat proprietor, who is full of complaints, and his waitress wife. Bailey's daughter describes the place as "broken-down" after her dancing is praised by Red Sammy's wife. Red Sammy treats his wife as if the restaurant is busy with patrons by ordering her off to the kitchen, preventing her from conversing with the family.

Red Sammy Butts

Red Sammy enters into a dialogue with the grandmother that Evans characterizes as a "festival of clichès" where "[e]very single one of his opening phrases is a commonplace platitude" that does, however, reveal his character as competitive, suspicious of others, and self-justifying. The dialogue is between a two people who find each other likeable because they enjoy complaining together.

When the grandmother agrees with Red Sammy's platitudes by saying that "People are certainly not nice like they used to be", Red Sammy responds that he regrets that he let two men driving an "old beat-up Chrysler" to buy gasoline on credit. The grandmother misinterprets Red Sammy by exclaiming his generosity by calling him a "good man", where the man responds: "'Yes'm, I suppose so,' Red Sam said as if he were struck with this answer."

The grandmother suggests to Red Sammy that The Misfit might attack The Tower, though he ignored the comment to take the opportunity to complain with the platitude that is the story's title: "'A good man is hard to find', Red Sammy said. 'Everything is getting terrible. I remember the day you could go off and leave your screen door unlatched. Not no more.'" The complaint is comical because a house that is open except for an unlatched screen door is no serious barrier for a violent criminal. The grandmother who watches "Queen for a Day" may have found a kindred spirit in the complaint-filled proprietor — she does not perceive Red Sammy's comment as witless or objectionable, nor does she appreciate the differences between the road advertisements and the man or the restaurant. The dialogue ends with a narrative comment using Red Sammy's monkey.

Red Sammy Butts' wife

The wife of the fat owner of The Tower is a "a tall burnt-brown woman with hair and eyes lighter than her skin" who works as a waitress. In the story, Red Sammy directs his wife as if she was any ordinary waitress, preventing her to enter into sociable chat with Baily's family. She tolerates an insult from June Star in the interest of business revenue by deflecting it: "Ain't she cute" and "stretching her mouth slightly". She testifies that cupidity has undermined trust in all human relationships, even those between spouses: “'It isn’t a soul in this green world of God’s that you can trust,' she said. 'And I don’t count nobody out of that, not nobody,' she repeated, looking at Red Sammy.'" Red Sammy ignores his wife's comment and doesn't defend himself even though he appears to be accused of infidelity.

Gray monkey

Red Sammy Butts' pet monkey appears for the arrival and departure of Bailey and his family at The Tower. On arrival, the monkey fears John Wesley and June Star and climbs up into the chinaberry tree it is chained to for safety. On departure, the monkey is seen pleasurably eating the fleas that it has picked off itself, an image appearing just after the grandmother and Red Sammy Butts agree with a sense of finality that "Europe was entirely to blame for the way things were now". As the monkey's fleas contain its own flesh, its grotesque action is a comic narrative comment that the grandmother and Mr. Butts are fools given the allusion to Ecclesiastes 4:5: "The fool folds his hands and eats his own flesh."

Escaped prison convicts

The Misfit, Bobby Lee, and Hiram are three convicts who have escaped prison, presumably together. The character's name "Bobby Lee" alludes to Robert E. Lee and a rebellion the three have initiated.

The Misfit

The Misfit appears to be the leader of the three escaped convicts, as Hiram and Bobby Lee submit to The Misfit's orders and direction. The Misfit orders Bobby Lee and Hiram to execute all of Bailey's family except his mother. In contrast to the superficial family, the presence of The Misfit is dramatic and horrifying as he presents original thoughts and articulates his life of suffering. The cliché that is the title of the story is made meaningful by The Misfit speaking with the grandmother: "'Nome, I ain't a good man, but I ain't the worst in the world neither.'"

The character named himself The Misfit because he is a victim of injustice in that "I can't make what all I done wrong fit what all I gone through in punishment". As a victim of inequity in two sentences, as if it was rehearsed, he blames Jesus as a source of his mistreatment, likens his victimization to that experienced by Jesus, and denies being guilty of the crime for which he was imprisoned: "Jesus thrown everything off balance. It was the same case with Him as with me except He hadn't committed any crime and they could prove I had committed one because they had the papers on me." To the sound of a gunshot, The Misfit declares his motive as a form of righteous rebellion to the grandmother: "Does it seem right to you, lady, that one is punished a heap and another ain't punished at all?" The Misfit articulates his resentment regarding his punishment as death for original sin as a crime only described by paper, i.e. the Bible, a crime committed by Adam and one he does not feel any responsibility for and punishment for which he describes to God by looking up into the sky and tracing a prison cell.

The Misfit is also a misfit in other ways. As a boy, he was a misfit within his own family. His father noted his extraordinary curiosity about the meaning of life and death: "My daddy said I was a different breed of dog from my brothers and sisters. 'You know', Daddy said, 'it's some that can live their whole life out without asking about it and it's others has to know why it is, and this boy is one of the latter. He's going to be into everything!'" (Here, he is a boy to his father, but The Misfit regards himself as a beast, as Qoheleth regarded the human condition in Ecclesiastes 3:18: "I said in my heart with regard to the children of man that God is testing them that they may see that they themselves are but beasts.") Raised as a Baptist in or near Hopewell, the curious boy appears to have been a member of the church choir, and likely asked his parents and churchmen theological questions for which there are no definite answers. His father's death in the 1918 flu pandemic likely helped turn the boy's inquisitiveness into an unquenchable thirst for answers that demonstrated his rejection of religious faith required by the answers provided by his Church, including the denial of Jesus as savior as the answer to the problem of evil. His faithlessness likely made him a misfit in Hopewell, as the questioning would have caused his neighbors to consider him a heretic in the Bible Belt, if not evil, so he left Hopewell to find answers through experience as an undertaker, a farmer, a U.S. Marine between World Wars, a railway worker, and twice as a husband. Instead of enjoying his life, he found a world of despair, suffering, and death. His experiences the same plight as Qoheleth saw written in the same chapters as "A Time for Everything":

"Moreover, I saw under the sun that in the place of justice, even there was wickedness, and in the place of righteousness, even there was wickedness. I said in my heart, God will judge the righteous and the wicked, for there is a time for every matter and for every work." (Ecclesiastes 3:16–17)

The Misfit is, however, not comforted by Qoheleth's words, as sometime in his life he concludes that God has dealt him death as punishment for the original sin of The First Man. The Misfit became an outcast. He was initially imprisoned for one or more crimes he doesn't remember doing and ended up in a federal penitentiary and likely sentenced to death for committing murder. While confined, The Misfit feels humiliation is being used as a form of punishment in that he is accused of killing his father, the figurative term used in psychoanalysis for characterizing the Oedipus complex.

In addition, the suspense in the central conflict involves the grandmother's desperate efforts to overcome her cliché-limited thinking to challenge The Misfit's original thoughts using exclamations from the Methodist revivals of her faith — "Pray!" and "Jesus!". Ironically, the grandmother fails to beat The Misfit's intellectual challenge, but she wins by so upsetting the self-righteous Misfit into revealing the weakness of his theology by mistake and using a "love conquers all" gesture that comes from her spirit. The weakness that is the faith in his belief Jesus is not savior appears as the image of his "red-rimmed and pale and defenseless looking" eyes behind the silver-rimmed spectacles that is the metaphor for his theology.

Hiram and Bobby Lee

Hiram and Bobby Lee are convicts who escaped prison with The Misfit. The two kill Bailey, his wife and children, and on the murder of the grandmother by The Misfit, Bobby Lee suggests to The Misfit that killing her was enjoyable. The Misfit's response to Bobby Lee indicates that Bobby Lee's expectation was serious, and not a joke, reflecting Bobby Lee's passion for sadism and his recruitment in the rebellion, as with Hiram, as an obedient killer who is unaware of or doesn't understand The Misfit's cause.

Bobby Lee is named for Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general who is often thought of as a model Southern gentleman. The appearance and actions of Bobby Lee and June Star's characterization of him as a "pig" reflects O'Connor's negative opinion of the Confederate icon.

The naked child

Just outside of Atlanta, the grandmother sees from the road a young black boy she calls a "pickaninny" standing in the doorway of a shack. She says, admiringly that the scene is iconic: "If I could paint, I’d paint that picture." June Star comments that the boy has no pants, and the grandmother ignores the picture of devastating poverty as just the state of being for rural black people: "Little niggers in the country don’t have things like we do." The grandmother who, throughout the story, longingly refers to her past and only things in the present that remind her of her younger days, remarks that she sees beauty in poverty, that the ideal state for black people is quiet obediance in destitution to the racial and economic oppression that was the Jim Crow South ideal of Southern ladies of the era. The grandmother's indifference to the plight of the oppressed, hypocritical with respect to the doctrines of her own religion, contrasts sharply with The Misfit's viewpoints on suffering caused by oppression and injustice.

Themes

The book of Ecclesiastes motif

"A Time for Everything" & "It's no pleasure in life"

Through allusions to and parallels with elements in Ecclesiastes, some mentioned elsewhere in this article, the Old Testament writing of Qoheleth and its narrator in Ecclesiastes appears as a thematic and literary motif for "A Good Man Is Hard to Find". The Misfit, a former undertaker, likely very well-versed in reciting "A Time for Everything" from Ecclesiastes 3:1–8 at funerals, ends the story by declaring his killing “It’s no real pleasure in life” that alludes to the "evil days" that precede death in Ecclesiastes 12:1:

"Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come and the years draw near of which you will say, 'I have no pleasure in them';".

By referring to Ecclesiastes, The Misfit demonstrates that he has read the book by recognizing that he is no longer a youth and will some day be caught and executed for his crimes.

Ecclesiastes, with its bleak viewpoints about man's physical, moral, and spiritual conditions, conveys many of the darker aspects of the human condition with an emphasis on death and meaninglessness. In 2009, Richard Giannone described darkness as a theme in many of Flannery O'Connor works, including "A Good Man Is Hard to Find", that naturally relate to the dark themes in Ecclesiastes. Elements of the motif not mentioned elsewhere are described below.

"Man does not know his time"

The family’s encounter with The Misfit and death is a shocking surprise encounter with evil that is reflected in Qoheleth’s wisdom in Ecclesiastes 9:12 that characterizes the climax of the story that takes place in a ditch Bailey's car falls into:

"For man does not know his time. Like fish that are taken in an evil net, and like birds that are caught in a snare, so the children of man are snared at an evil time, when it suddenly falls upon them.”

The Bible verse appears under a theme of "wisdom is better than folly" and suggests a moral message that the wise are prepared for the unexpected while the fool is not. With respect to Catholic doctrine that God's judgment of one's soul occurs just after death, the warning to Christians is that they should be prepared for the judgment at all times because life can end at any moment, a condition O'Connor said especially applied to the grandmother due to her advanced age.

Hevel and superficiality

Superficiality as a character theme (as mentioned in the Characters section), in which things of importance, such as the moral meaning of ‘’goodness’’, are treated as trivial. The concept of meaninglessness, frivolity, shallowness, and empty-headedness are aspects of the Hebrew word ‘’hevel’’ appearing in Ecclesiastes that has been translated as “vanity”, “insubstantial”, “futile”, and “meaningless”. The character theme appears as the lack of seriousness members of Bailey’s family face moral questions and death, their lack of effort to achieve salvation, and inattention to the welfare of others as the object of charity (let alone family members such as Bailey's injured wife).

"Nothing new under the sun"

The viewpoint in Ecclesiastes that “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun” Ecclesiastes 1:9 is Qoheleth’s wisdom that appears tired and old as he tries to persuade the aged reader to maintain their faith in God at the conclusion of his writing in chapter 12. The literal notion of the verse is realized by the grandmother and The Misfit in separate ways.

The grandmother's attention to her past rather than the present gives the literal meaning of verse 9 as "the present is the past". The grandmother points only to Georgia scenery she has seen before, where immediately after the motif through the image of sunlight: "The trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled." The stories she tells her grandchildren are revisitations of her own past — the dream of wealth she associates with Edgar Atkins Teagarden and the fantasy of living the life of a genteel Southern lady in the Gone with the Wind plantation house of her movie-enhanced memory made into a vivid reality that can be visited that becomes a tragic mistake. The widow's superficiality appears as weariness and age in its cluelessness and thoughtlessness that is literally inattention to the present because so much of her limited energy is consumed with thoughts about the past and projections about what could have been. Being lost in the present she mistakes Red Sammy Butt's complaint that he has been a victim of theft, misses his wife's complaint about his infidelity and so continues to confide with him, and cannot see the man is nothing like the billboards that describe him.

For The Misfit, verse 9 is about Qoheleth's ancient views about the human condition that persist in the present. Even with the advent of Jesus, the problem of evil persists. In particular, evil still goes unpunished; and injustice and oppression persist, including the punishment of death for original sin even for the most devout Christians, and the seemingly abitrary administration of justice by man to which he notes Jesus, like himself, are victims. The conditions of life and his stands against injustice have worn him. The Misfit is passed middle age but appears older than he is and seems to be weary of life with his graying hair, "long creased face", "thin shoulders", and eyes that are "red-rimmed and pale and defenseless-looking".

"Remember your Creator in the days of your youth"

The story's setting at The Tower, "a long dark room with a counter at one end and tables at the other and dancing space in the middle". With its grotesquely obese owner, broken-down truck, broken-down building, and cheap board tables, The Tower is in a state of deterioration. The Tower's darkness is joyless except for Bailey's mother who enjoys the jukebox playing "The Tennessee Waltz" that refers to her native state: the proprietor, advertised as "The fat man with the happy laugh", doesn't laugh at all and does nothing but complain; his pet monkey runs away from his customers; Bailey won't dance with his mother; June Star dutifully shows-off her tap dancing skills to her indifferent family in a place she "wouldn’t live in ... for a million bucks"; and the proprietor's wife suggests the infidelity of her husband to customers and is treated by him as an ordinary waitress.

As a play on the word pit as a dark place like Sheol and the barbeque that is the specialty of the restaurant is cooked in barbeque pits, the narrative comment on The Tower is that it is “dead”, i.e., a dark place with a ramshackle appearance that isn’t patronized by very many people that contrasts with the energetic tap-dancing child, June Star, that in the narrative of Ecclesiastes alludes to chapter 12:

"Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come and the years draw near of which you will say, 'I have no pleasure in them'; before the sun and the light and the moon and the stars are darkened and the clouds return after the rain, in the day when the keepers of the house tremble, and the strong men are bent, and the grinders cease because they are few, and those who look through the windows are dimmed, and the doors on the street are shut — when the sound of the grinding is low, and one rises up at the sound of a bird, and all the daughters of song are brought low — ...". (Ecclesiastes 12:1–4)

Given Ecclesiastes chapter 12 that contrasts youth and the aged, the story's scene at The Tower suggests a moral. For the Methodist adults who don't remind their children of their Creator (especially for appreciating their fleeting youth) or even saying grace before their meal, the product is disrespectful brats who act like prematurely aged miniature joyless adults that treat real adults as peers — the cynical, self-centered June Star and the fan of fictional super heroes that is John Wesley, children that appear to learn much of what they know about right from wrong from comic books and television shows.

"Cast your bread upon the waters"

The grandmother's misinterpretation of Red Sammy Butts' regret about lending money to strangers as a morally good act recalls Qoheleth's precept about generocity in Ecclesiastes 11:1–2: "Cast your bread upon the waters, for you will find it after many days. Give a portion to seven, or even to eight, for you know not what disaster may happen on earth." The grandmother sees Butts as a good man and is blessed with an enterprise so appealing that she thinks it will be attacked by The Misfit, and is deaf to his wife's accusation of infidelity, and blind to his deceptive advertising practices.

"A threefold cord is not quickly broken"

The number of escaped convicts working together alludes to Qoheleth's logic that three working together against an oppressor (as The Misfit considers their activities as labor) is better than two or one man alone in Ecclesiastes chapter 4 that includes: "And though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him — a threefold cord is not quickly broken." (Ecclesiastes 4:12)

The rebel prophet and his testament

O'Connor referred to The Misfit as "a prophet gone wrong" and a "spoiled prophet". As a prophet, The Misfit is interested in learning and preaching. The trajectory of his life from energetic Christian to extreme skeptic broadly follows what Qoheleth expected: "Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come and the years draw near of which you will say, 'I have no pleasure in them'". (Ecclesiastes 12:1) The grandmother couldn't help notice The Misfit's weary-looking physiognomy of a man who takes no enjoyment in living — a bespectacled man with graying hair and thin shoulder blades. He is a "rich man" given his lack of complaints regarding the material essentials for living and needing no help, in the context of O'Connor's characterization and the biblical story of Jesus and the rich young man. The Misfit's discovery of suffering as a human condition also alludes to the spiritual awakening of Gautama Buddha, the "spoiled" wealthy young man who developed a philosophy and practices to address suffering.

The Misfit, experienced with reciting Ecclesiastes chapter 3 at funerals, twice states in the dialogue with the grandmother, "Jesus thrown everything off balance", a theological comment, as if made by a prophet teacher. The second expression is mentioned in context with Jesus and the rich young man: "Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead “and shouldn’t have done it. He thrown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it’s nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him, and if He didn’t, then it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can-by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness." In Matthew 19:21, Jesus says to the rich young man whose righteousness is suspect, "If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me." In the case that Jesus did raise the dead, the twice-married Misfit has concluded that Jesus would render humanity with no pleasures in life by his rejection of what one theological perspective that Qoheleth in Ecclesiastes said was the objective of life, particularly about enjoyment of wealth that is the result of one's toil. Just after "A Time for Everything", Qoheleth writes:

"what gain has the worker from his toil? I have seen the business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with. He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil — this is God’s gift to man." (Ecclesiastes 3:9–13)

And so says in Ecclesiastes chapter 9:

"Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life that he has given you under the sun, because that is your portion in life and in your toil at which you toil under the sun. Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might, for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going." (Ecclesiastes 9:9–10)

The Misfit interprets Ecclesiastes pessimistically, as the main concern of classical Jewish eschatology was the fate of the nation and not what happens to an individual at death or thereafter and as many scholars have, for example:

"Death cancels all imagined gains, rendering life under the sun absurd. Therefore the best policy is to enjoy one’s wife, together with good food and drink, during youth, for old age and death will soon put an end to this ‘relative’ good. In short, Qoheleth examined all of life and discovered no absolute good that would survive death’s effect … Qoheleth bears witness to an intellectual crisis in ancient Israel."

The Misfit's rejection of Jesus as savior but continued belief in God places him theologically in the sense of the Old Testament that includes much of the Hebrew Bible where Sheol is the place of darkness to which the dead go, the place referred to by Qoheleth in Ecclesiastes without mention of punishment nor reward. Unlike the New Testament Heaven, sheol means "grave" or "pit" and "ditch", where it is characterized as a Pit to be seen and "the pit of destruction" in Psalms 16:10 and Isaiah 38:17, respectively. The Old Testament Sheol that is a ditch "arouses a range of emotions from ordinary apprehension to utter dread caused by imminent danger in the unknown, for the pit is dark, grimly silent, lifeless, and remote, lying beneath roots of mountains".

The Misfit uses Qoheleth's bleak outlook on both life and death to justify his demand for an accounting for his misdeeds and his excuse for doing evil. In Ecclesiastes 3 along with "A Time for Everything", Qoheleth says he can't explain what happens to the soul in Sheol in Ecclesiastes 3:21 and the narrator in Ecclesiastes suddenly appears to bring the book to an abrupt end by closing it with the verse, "For God will bring every deed into judgment with every secret thing, whether good or evil." (Ecclesiastes 12:14) The Misfit wants the list of his misdeeds. Qoheleth also said people find the divine administration of justice as unjust because it is not known when punishment for wickedness will ever be administered:

"Because the sentence against an evil deed is not executed speedily, the heart of the children of man is fully set to do evil. (Ecclesiastes 8:11)

In the verse, The Misfit has found a reason for being evil by interpreting it to mean evil is man's nature (rather than misbehaving in need of speedy correction through punishment), and a rebel against divine injustice. It might be seen that The Misfit has determined that he will get a hearing with God to explain his actions while being judged from his abode in Sheol.

"The dead who are already dead more fortunate than the living"

Ecclesiastes chapter 4 also suggests an anagoge for the purpose and method for The Misfit's rebellion — a twisted notion that death is a form of liberation from oppression by interpreting Qoheleth literally. Qoheleth states that being dead or unborn is better than living to experience the horror of oppression, with little solace and no comforter for the oppressed.

"Again I saw all the oppressions that are done under the sun. And behold, the tears of the oppressed, and they had no one to comfort them! On the side of their oppressors there was power, and there was no one to comfort them. And I thought the dead who are already dead more fortunate than the living who are still alive. But better than both is he who has not yet been and has not seen the evil deeds that are done under the sun." (Ecclesiastes 4:1–3)

The ditch as a setting for Sheol

A ditch is a type of pit, "pit" of Psalms 16:10 and Isaiah 38:17 being "Sheol" mentioned in Ecclesiastes as the place souls of the dead are found, is the setting where Bailey’s family trip ends in a disastrous car accident, the place where killers arrive in a black car that looks like a hearse, the scene of the grandmother's murder and the place the rest of the family is taken from to be murdered, and where The Misfit tells the grandmother his unhappy life and his dark testament. For the living, the ditch is Sheol in the sense it is a pit as a deep dark place associated with death.

Sheol in contrast with the New Testament Heaven

The posture of the grandmother's dead body, sitting up with her face smiling towards the sky, is the image of a soul looking out of the ditch of the figurative Sheol up skyward towards Heaven. The grandmother's posture is the image of the eschatological break the New Testament's Jesus makes with the Old Testament, exemplified by Ecclesiastes.

The pit and serpent in a moral tale

The Misfit is an example of major characters in O'Connor's works whom Richard Giannone says "end in the hole they dug for themselves". The Misfit describes his imprisonment as being "buried alive" that alludes to being placed in a pit that is a grave.

The word pit appears in Qoheleth’s discussion about the follies of rulers. In Ecclesiastes 8:1 he says, "He who digs a pit will fall into it, and a serpent will bite him who breaks through a wall." The aphorism is the image of The Misfit's destructive punishable efforts as a metaphor for him digging his own grave, i.e., his killings (as digging a pit for the murdered) that will lead to his own execution (leading to his own pit that is his grave). Of her character's future, O'Connor said in a letter to Robert Lowell, "My prophet will be inarticulate and burnt by his own visions. He'll have to explode somewhere."

From The Misfit's perspective, his serpent relates to the dragon personified by the grandmother in the literal sense, and St. Cyril's dragon in the anagogical sense. By accidentally raising doubts about The Misfit's dearest belief that is his faith in Jesus not being savior, the faith that underlies his commitment to kill, the grandmother becomes the killer's spiritual adversary. The attack becomes physical when the grandmother touches The Misfit and he reacts “as if a snake had bitten and shot her three times through the chest", an act O'Connor called a "recoil". Given St. Cyril's lecture, anagogically, the grandmother's attack is a bite from St. Cyril's dragon in which The Misfit reacts in spiritual self-defense by stopping the attack.

"She would have been a good woman if ... "

At the end of the story, The Misfit recognizes the grandmother as a fellow sinner who is not good like himself though the grandmother's last act by touching him after pronouncing him as "one of my own children" was an act of moral goodness by saying, "She would have been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." The quote emphasizes that The Misfit understands what Jesus meant by saying there are no good men, and that he raises the possibility of people being good if there was someone there to threaten killing them every moment of their life. (O'Connor stated in a letter to John Hawkes that the "someone" The Misfit refers to is himself, which is consistent with the statement's novel nature.) While such an arrangement is a fantasy, Qoheleth expressed the idea that the inclination toward moral goodness is enhanced by reminders of death by writing Ecclesiastes as a reminder to people that they will die and that one of few things that have meaning in life is that they will be judged by God after death for what they did while living. The Misfit affirms Qoheleth as his own testament by telling his accomplice: "Shut up, Bobby Lee. It's no real pleasure in life."

Violence

O'Connor explained that she used violence in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" to make her characters become more concerned with spiritual matters and to express theological themes.

In a 1963 introduction to the story at a reading at Hollins College in Roanoke, Virginia, O'Connor explained she used violence because she saw no other way to bring her characters to their senses, which is say to at least get them to recognize the offering of divine grace:

"...[I]n my own stories I have found that violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace. Their heads are so hard that almost nothing else will do the work. This idea, that reality is something to which we must be returned at considerable cost, is one which is seldom understood by the casual reader, but it is one which is implicit in the Christian view of the world."

In "A Good Man Is Hard to Find", the imminent death of the Bailey's family, particularly the grandmother, presents each member with the very last opportunity to complete a deed that will favor their Christian salvation since Catholics believe God will judge each person's soul immediately after death. O'Connor said:

"... the man in the violent situation reveals those qualities least dispensable in his personality, those qualities which are all he will have to take into eternity with him; and since the characters in this story are all on the verge of eternity, it is appropriate to think of what they take with them."

As the story concludes, from a Roman Catholic perspective, only the grandmother performs an act that contributes toward her justification.

Anguish, mercy, charity, divine grace, and imitation of God

The author's intent

In a 1960 response to a letter from novelist John Hawkes, Flannery O'Connor explained the significance of divine grace in Catholic theology in contrast to Protestant theology, and in doing so, explained the offers of grace made to the grandmother and The Misfit at the climax of the story immediately after the already agitated Misfit explained his anguish caused by not being able to witness whether or not Jesus is savior and that it was by faith alone that the decided Jesus is not savior:

"Cutting yourself off from Grace is a very decided matter, required a real choice, act of will, and affecting the very ground of the soul. The Misfit is touched by the Grace that comes through the old lady when she recognizes his as her child, as she has been touched by the Grace that comes through him in his particular suffering."

Both the superficial grandmother and the heretic The Misfit have cut themselves off from opportunities to receive divine grace prior to the story. The deprivation of religion and church life from a Southern lady's social life is devastating and the absence of religion in the story's narrative by an author concerned with spiritual life suggests that the grandmother lost an argument with Bailey about church-going and participation in a church community that the grandmother resented and regarded as a deprivation. At the story's climax, The Misfit, while wearing Bailey's shirt, is in anguish just after he explains the suffering he has witnessed and felt in his own life, alludes to his judgment that much of the suffering, including death for original sin, is undeserved and, to the extent it is undeserved is a form of oppression that he can end by killing the victims of oppression. The Misfit's anguish "clears for an instant" the grandmother's head, as she recalls the argument she had and lost with Bailey about the relevance of God and church-going, and takes the opportunity to try to win the same argument with her killer by imitating God himself (e.g., "God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him." in 1 John 4:16) in an act of mercy that also demonstrates Christian charity (e.g., the love for others as one loves God): "Why you're one of my babies. You're one of my own children."

As for The Misfit, O'Connor explained that the opportunity of grace is offered to him by the grandmother's touching him, an act she calls a gesture:

"Her [the grandmother's] head clears for an instant and she realizes, even in her limited way, that she is responsible for the man before her and joined to him by ties of kinship which have their roots deep in the mystery she has been merely prattling about so far. And at this point, she does the right thing, she makes the right gesture."

O'Connor's reference to the "mystery" the grandmother prattled about is the incarnation of Jesus as savior as the means for people to be absolved for their sins in order to be eternally joined with God, and in that context, "kinship" refers to all people in that they are descendants of Adam and Eve who committed the sin that would forever separate humans from God and brought death upon humanity as a punishment for the original sin. O'Connor further clarified that the grandmother's actions were selfless: "... the grandmother is not in the least concerned with God but reaches out to touch the Misfit".

In her letter to John Hawkes, O'Connor explained that The Misfit did not accept the offer of grace in her story but that the grandmother's gesture did change him:

"His [The Misfit's] shooting her is a recoil, a horror at her humanness, but after he has done it and cleaned his glasses, the Grace has worked in him and he pronounces his judgment: she would have been a good woman if he had been there every moment of her life."

Criticism

In spite of O'Connor's efforts to explain the climax of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find", others disagree with her view on the offerings of grace and her characters' and the reactions of the characters to the offerings. Some say that Flannery O'Connor uses the excuse as the grandmother's final "moment of grace" to save the story from the bloodshed and violence. Frederick Asals argues that "one can easily pass over her [O'Connor's] hope that the grandmother's final gesture to The Misfit might have begun a process which would 'turn him into the prophet he was meant to become'; that, as she firmly says, is another story, and it would be a reckless piety indeed which would see it even suggested by the one we have". Some commonly point out that the grandmother's gesture is just a confused old lady touching someone who looks like her son because he is wearing her son's shirt. Other opinions include that it is contradictory of her character or that she was simply again trying to save herself and that her selfishness was never overcome throughout the story.

The grandmother's gesture toward The Misfit has been criticized as an unreasonable action by a character often perceived as intellectually, or morally, or spiritually incapable of doing it. O'Connor's rebuttal is that such readers and critics have underestimated the grandmother. As indicated in her letters, lectures, readings, and essays, O'Connor felt compelled to explain the story and the gesture years after publication, for example, as "Reasonable Use of the Unreasonable", the title of her notes for a 1962 reading at Hollins College in Virginia O'Connor believed one understandable reason for the criticism is that the concept of grace she used is unique to a Roman Catholic perspective, as she clarified the point to John Hawkes in a letter:

"In the Protestant view, I think Grace and nature don't have much to do with each other. The old lady, because of her hypocrisy and humanness and banality couldn't be a medium for Grace. In the sense that I see things the other way, I'm a Catholic writer."

By mentioning "nature", O'Connor refers to her anagogical vision, which she addresses the grandmother's spiritual life which has been enlivened by the threat to her life. She wrote in her reading notes:

"The action or gesture I'm talking about would have to be on the anagogical level, that is, the level which has to do with the Divine life and our participation in it. It would be a gesture that transcended any neat allegory that might have been intended or any pat moral categories a reader could make. It would be a gesture which somehow made contact with mystery."

For her reading, O'Connor noted the grandmother was "responsible for the man before her and joined to him by ties of kinship which have their roots deep in the mystery she has been merely prattling about so far", in which the mystery is God's love for mankind through the incarnation and death of his son, Jesus. The reference to the grandmother's kinship is not only to The Misfit, but also to her living and past connections in east Tennessee, where a focus of her lady friends and relatives social lives revolve around a Methodist church; and her son, whom she loved even though he was involved in removing religion from her life. From this perspective, the reader is not to dismiss the grandmother as a parody of a Southern lady of years past — she is one as a comical misfit with modern times that has cut her off from everything that sustains a lady, including the church. In short, the author expected the reader to understand what the life of a Southern lady is like. Overall, O'Connor's rebuttal relies on the reader's perception of the spiritual strengths the grandmother acquired in her past and were only brought to bare with her spiritual dual with The Misfit that is the climax of the story.

Adaptations

A film adaptation of the short story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find", entitled Black Hearts Bleed Red, was made in 1992 by New York filmmaker Jeri Cain Rossi. The film stars noted New York artist Joe Coleman, but according to reviewers the film does not depict the story well.

The American folk musician Sufjan Stevens adapted the story into a song going by the same title. It appears on his 2004 album Seven Swans. The song is written in the first-person from the point of view of The Misfit.

In May 2017, Deadline Hollywood reported that director John McNaughton would make a feature film adaptation of the story starring Michael Rooker, from a screenplay by Benedict Fitzgerald.

See also

• Anagoge
• Charity (virtue)
• Cyril of Jerusalem
• Divine grace
• Ecclesiastes
• Flannery O'Connor
• Jesus and the Rich Young Man
• Methodism
• Mercy
• Particular Judgment
• Sheol
• Southern gothic literature

Further reading

Flannery O'Connor (1993). Frederick Asals (ed.). A good man is hard to find. Rutgers University Press. ISBN 978-0-8135-1977-7. Contains the original text as well as a collect.

Jan Nordby Gretlund, Karl-Heinz Westarp, ed. (2006). Flannery O'Connor's radical reality. Univ of South Carolina Press. ISBN 978-1-57003-601-9. Several essays discuss the story in the context of Flannery's work as whole.

George Kilcourse (2001). Flannery O'Connor's religious imagination: a world with everything off balance. Paulist Press. ISBN 978-0-8091-4005-3. Focuses on the religious aspects of Flannery's writings, including those in this short story.

Works cited

"Ecclesiastes". The Holy Bible. English Standard Version.

Bartholomew, Craig (May 1999). "Qoheleth in the Canon?! Current Trends in the Interpretation of Ecclesiastes". Themelios. 24 (3): 4–20.

Evans, Robert C. (2010). "Clichés, Superficial Story-Telling, and the Dark Humor of Flannery O'Connor's 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find'". In Bloom, Harold; Hobby, Blake (eds.). Bloom's Literary Themes: Dark Humor. Infobase Publishing. pp. 139–148. ISBN 9781438131023.

Giannone, Richard (2008). "Making It in Darkness". Flannery O'Connor Review. 6. The Board of Regents of the Georgia College and State University System: 103–118. JSTOR 26671141.

O'Connor, Flannery (2012). Fitzgerald, Sally; Fitzgerald, Robert (eds.). Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 9781466829046.

O'Connor, Flannery (1979). Fitzgerald, Sally (ed.). The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 9780374521042.

External links

• Online text of the short story
• Flannery O'Connor reading "A Good Man Is Hard to Find"