In a short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, which was written in 1953, Flannery O’Connor describes a tragedy happened in a family because of how the grandmother behaved. O’Connor shows the grandmother as a person deserving compassion and pity at first, but then the actions of this character start to cause the reader feel anger and condemnation. The grandmother’s character does not stay the same throughout the story, but changes as the character realizes her mistakes and flaws when it is too late.
The grandmother is presented in the first sentence of the story as a simple old woman, who wants to go to Tennessee instead of Florida, where the family has planned to have a vacation (O’Connor 1). However, in the very first paragraph, O’Connor already shows how the grandmother is used to manipulate people. She tells to her son that she is a runaway called The Misfit has escaped prison simply to persuade him to go to Tennessee instead of Florida (O’Connor 1). Here the readers can already feel that her attempt to influence her son says about her disrespect to him and the family’s interests. She then tries to influence her daughter-in-law in a different way, but the son and his wife do not react in any possible way, and the children answer instead that she would not stay at home for a million of dollars as she needs to be with them all the time (O’Connor 2). This reply is very disrespectful to the grandmother, but it is the reply that the selfish woman deserves after making her interests more important than her family’s and trying to influence their decisions and having no respect to them.
Later in the story, the grandmother shows how she values her own interests above the interests of others many times. She secretly takes a cat with her on the trip, although she knows that her son would not like it (O’Connor 2). She also lies to the children in order to visit a place from her youth (O’Connor 9). Still, she does not see how selfish she is during these actions and how disrespectful she is to others. She thinks she is a decent lady and tries to prove it though dressing in nice clothes, being nice and polite and talking about how people were much better and respectful in her youth. In fact, her actions and words show that she in fact is a person, who thinks she is better and smarter than the others. During the visit to The Tower, the grandmother remembers old times and makes a compliment to the owner saying he is a good man (O’Connor 8). Yet, earlier in the story she calls a black boy “the cute little pickaninny”, which was considered a racist term back in 1953, and just before saying this she claims that people were more respectful in her youth, so her actions contradict her beliefs (O’Connor 4). This and many other examples show that the woman was delusional about her own personality, her behavior and the image others had of her, and at the same time she totally did not understand the consequences of her actions.
Finally, her true personality is shoed to the reader when she meets the Misfit. When she recognized him, she tells him about it right away, instead of thinking about the consequences of this behavior (O’Connor 14). And indeed in response he tells that the family would have stayed alive if she did not tell she recognized him (O’Connor 14). But what amazes the most is that the only person the woman tries to save from being killed is herself. As her family is being taken into the woods one by one, she never even tries to save anyone and ask the Misfit to spare anyone’s life except for her own (O’Connor 15). The grandmother only realizes that she is a very bad person, who caused the death for the whole family, only seconds before being shot. She shows compassion to the Misfit because she understands now that his behavior is a result of the actions of bad people like her (O’Connor 22). Although she tried to influence The Misfit during their conversation, as well as shows him how close to God she is, her death becomes a true changing experience to the grandmother.
The grandmother is a complex character, who can at first make the readers believe that she is a good person, who suffers from disrespect of her family. But the reader slowly begins to understand that her image is not real and that the grandmother is not a well-mannered and good-hearted person, who deserves compassion. She is instead an unpleasant, selfish person, who deserves to be condemned because of leading her family to death and not even trying to protect it. But her last seconds in this world open up her eyes to her own personality, as she understands that the tragedy is her fault. O’Connor used the character of the grandmother to show to the reader that people can change for the better under the pressure of circumstances. The whole story the grandmother was self-centered and did not care much about other people. However, as O’Connor particularly shows, the grandmother was able to change and become a better person despite her personality because she was finally able to understand The Misfit, care for him and feel compassion towards him. O’Connor teaches the reader that if a person stops being selfish and becomes empathic, the person is able to become a better person and even to know God. The purpose of her writing is, thus, to make people understand that tragedies and disasters are caused by people’s everyday behavior and that the way to change the situation is to start with yourself.
Works Cited
O'Connor, Flannery. A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1992. Print.
