Flannery O'Connor: The Mystery of Grace

The Grandmother often finds herself at odds with the rest of her family. Everyone feels her domineering attitude over her family, even the youngest child knows that she's "afraid she'd miss something she has to go everywhere we go"(Good Man 2). Yet this accusation doesn't seem to phase the grandmother, and when it is her fault alone that the family gets into the car accident and is found by the Misfit, she decides to try to talk her way out of this terrible predicament.

However, when the grandmother realizes that the Misfit has the intention of killing the whole family, her included, she screams out in terror, "Jesus!...Pray...!You've got good blood!"(Good Man 20-21). O'Connor states in Mystery and Manners that she "found that violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace" (112).

The grandmother's chance at grace comes at the end of the story when she makes the gesture and reaches out to touch the Misfit. The grandmother finally realizes that "she is responsible" in some way, for the man before her" (Mystery and Manners 110). This is the grandmother's final chance at accepting the grace she has longed to have. Hendin states "each story in 'A Good Man is Hard to Find' embodies a visible sign of invisible grace"(17). Yet these pictures of grace are often hard to find.

McMullen goes on to say: "The good man is hard to find because language and events in the realistic narrative have given us a brutal murder whose meaning we look for in humanistic terms instead of O'Connor's hint of Grace that has its efficacy in a world beyond the constructed one in the story" (10).

O'Connor herself warns us to "be on the lookout for such things as the actions of grace in the Grandmother's soul, and not for the dead bodies" (Mystery and Manners 112).

Eggenschwiler probably expresses Ms. O'Connor's purpose best, "In her stories, grace is most often enlightenment, especially about oneself it is the fulfillment of a character's nature (132). The Grandmother learns more about her own character, through the actions of grace. Eggenschwiller explains the acceptance of grace by the grandmother: "In the end of the story it is not The Misfit, with his acute and interestingly perverted consciousness who triumphs; it is the obtuse but good-hearted grandmother as she dies in a moment of intuitive selflessness. She performs the one act that The Misfit will not do, losing the self in order to gain it" (52).

Even though the grandmother accepts her grace, it is ultimately each person's choice to receive grace. Eggenschwiler explains, "...not even the acceptance of grace completes man's nature for the rest of his life. He still remains free, and by faith, hope, love, and the grace he must continuously overcome despair" (98). Thus accepting grace does not complete our lives, it only begins the journey.