Granny and Her Grace

Granny and Her Grace

Flannery O'Connor's short story "A Good Man is Hard to Find" is a triumph in the attempt to explain good and evil and how sometimes those lines can be blurred. The story is a confrontation between a grandmother with a superficial sense of goodness and a criminal who embodies real evil. The Grandmother seems to treat goodness mostly as a task of being decent and having good manners. The Grandmother is a blurred character, which rests in the gray area of good and evil and eventually finds salvation.

The Grandmother is a manipulator. The first example is when she declares she does not want to go to Florida because of relatives she would prefer to see in Tennessee. She continuously attempts to change Bailey's mind by scaring him with the reports of a criminal on the loose and guilt trip him about taking his children into the area where the murderer was last seen. Her manipulation is subtle and non-confrontational. Bailey does not want her to bring her cat, yet she sneaks the cat into a basket and hides the cat in the floorboard of the car. She wants to go to the plantation and knows Bailey will not agree. Her solution is using the children to coerce him into going.

The Grandmother's selfishness and her manipulative ways are used when she encounters The Misfit. In her conversation with The Misfit, the Grandmother says that she knows he is from "good people," as she tries to flatter him in order to save her own life. Her last words to him as she reaches out to touch his shoulder, "You're one of my own children," (2578) may signify she has experienced a final moment of grace, or she may be the same selfish manipulator from the story's beginning. Either way, O'Connor uses the moment before death to demonstrate her strong belief that everyone deserves to be saved no matter how irreverent his or her actions are in life.

The Grandmother really does not seem the kind of person to show tenderness to a murderer. However, there is no reason to think that her final gesture is just one last endeavor to manipulate The Misfit. How the story's ending is read can depend on whether a person shares O'Connor's own religious outlook, or whether The Grandmother's gesture is something like a moment of grace, without explaining it religiously. All I can say for sure about The Grandmother's moment of grace is it will remain mysterious.

Works Cited

O'Connor, Flannery. "A Good Man is Hard to Find". The Heath Anthology of American

Literature. Ed. Paul Lauter. Boston, MA: Wadsworth, 2010, 2006. 2668-2578. Print.