Literary Analysis: "A Good Man is Hard to Find"

“A Good Man is Hard to Find,” by Flannery O’Connor is about a family driving to vacation when they get in a car accident. The family, including a husband and wife, their two children, and the husband’s mother, are approached by 3 men carrying guns after the accident. The grandmother recognizes a shirtless man as “the misfit,” a man who escaped from prison and was on the run towards Florida. Shortly after the family is taken out of the car by the three runaway convicts, they are taken into the woods and killed. The grandmother is the last family member alive, as she talks to the misfit for a short while. She tells the misfit that she believes he is a good man at heart and they talk about God. They talk about whether Jesus really raised the dead, and then the misfit raises his gun and shoots the grandmother in the chest 3 times.

I believe “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” is about the morals of different human beings. The morals of the misfit are obviously skewed, as he murdered an innocent family. What is not so obvious is the lack of morals coming from the grandmother. The first evidence of the grandmother’s lack of morals is when she prepares to leave for vacation by dressing up as a lady. She wants to look as much as a lady as possible incase the family got into a car accident, people would know she was a lady. Not only is this part of the story foreshadowing the event to come, it also shows that the grandmother is more worried about whether people think she is a lady, instead of the possibility her family could die in an accident. 

Another example of the grandmother’s lack of morals is her attitude change throughout the story. When the family stops at a restaurant, the grandmother talks to the restaurant owner about how a good man is hard to find. A little later, when the grandmother is sitting outside of the car speaking to the misfit, she tells him she believes he is a good man. She lies about what she believes to save her own life.