“A Good Man is Hard to Find” was written by Flannery O’Connor and first appeared in 1955. It is a short story that draws from Flannery O’Conner’s social and religious influences. She was born in 1925, in Savannah, Georgia, to Catholic parents and lived in Savannah for sometime, but moved to Milledgeville, because of her father’s sickness. Drawing on some of her social and religious experiences, Flannery O’Connor wrote the essay “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” a story about a family that sets out for a family vacation in Florida.
The grandmother is an old lady who has old fashioned ideas and manners. She is very talkative and manipulative. She gives the reader the idea that she is a good person and cares about her family. But it is also evident from her depiction in the story that she is racist and selfish.
Bailey is the old lady’s son. He is portrayed as an impatient character, who seems to be grumpy all the time and very intolerant of his mother’s interventions.
Bailey’s Wife is a young woman who is very quiet and is portrayed as the typical mother figure.
John Wesley and June Star are the couple’s children; they are wild and are not very respectful of their elders. They manipulate their parents and are rude to their grandmother.
The Misfit is an escaped convict, who dresses as though he is educated, though his language betrays this appearance. He is accused of killing his father. He is polite and kills without remorse. He is the leader of the threesome:Bobby Lee, Hiram (his partners in crime) and himself.
The story opens simply with the narrator cuing the reader into the situation. The family has planned to go on a vacation in Florida. But the grandmother wants to go to Tennessee; she tries to persuade the family to change their minds by warning of the possibility of meeting the Misfit face to face, but to no avail. She suffers the biting comments of her two grand children because of her attempt to change their minds.
Giving up on her attempt to change their minds, the grandmother, gets ready for the road trip to Florida. She is very formally dressed for the trip. Along the way, she enjoys the scenery and takes naps, while the children read comic books and eat, and their mother takes cares of the baby. The family lunches at Red Sammy’s Famous Barbecue, a restaurant along the way to their destination. After resuming their trip, the grandmother naps and at one point suddenly remembers a house that she had visited when she was a young lady and would like to visit again. She subtly persuades the rest of the family to go down an old dirt road to visit it.
This venture would be the cause of their deaths. As the grandmother suddenly remembers the house she is referring to is in fact in Tennessee. Her reaction to the shock she feels when she realizes her mistake, disturbs the cat that she has brought along without Bailey’s knowledge. The cat springs onto Bailey’s shoulder and causes the car to turn over once. The mother is thrown out of the car and breaks her shoulder. With no other alternative but to wait for someone to come along the road, the family waits. Unfortunately, the misfit comes along and the family is taken off piece by piece into the woods and murdered by the misfit and his accomplices.