ABSTRACT
In Flannery O’Connor’s short story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”, the grandmother clearly symbolizes the Old South, and her endless nostalgia for the past is intertwined with issues of race and her contempt for blacks. Although race was only the indirect subject of the story, it underlies the entire text, including the grandmother’s lost world of plantations, Southern ladies and gentlemen, family graveyards and Old Time Religion. She is literally the product of a horse-and-buggy era, but imagines this as a time when people were nicer to each other or at least pretended to have better ...