A Good Man is Hard to Find

In my opinion Flannery O’Conner’s short stories are gruesome and addicting. I hate how easily I can become attracted to her stories. This is the type of reaction O’Conner desires the reader to have though. A Good Man is Hard to Find is especially painful to read. The hypocritical grandmother is constantly complaining. Every time I find myself pitying the grandmother, she makes an inappropriate comment. The grandmother is so stubborn that she requires an act of violence in order to recognize the problem. In the very last moments of her life, she redeems her self. She tells the Misfit, the killer of her family, “ ‘you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children.’ ” She admits to helping create the “meanness” in the world. She raised Bailey to have bad manners and her generation raised the Misfit. The beauty of O’Conner’s stories lies within the vivid images and the dialect of each character. O’Conner’s belief that “reality is something to which we must be returned at considered cost” is seen through the vicious circumstances that each of her characters “wake up” in.