True Spirituality Is Hard To Find Essay

, Research Paper

“A Good Man is Hard to Find” is an extremely powerful commentary that elucidates Flannery O’Connor’s opinions about religion and society. Like the majority of her other works, ” A Good Man is Hard to Find” has attracted many “interpretations based on Christian dogma” (Bandy 1). These Christian explications are justified because Miss O’Connor is notorious for expressing Catholic doctrines through her fiction. Once she even remarked “I see from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy” (Kropf 1). This longstanding reputation compels every critic of O’Connor to expose the religious convictions encrypted within her stories. The grandmother’s final gesture towards the Misfit is not a moment of grace but rather an extremely selfish act intended to save her life at any cost. Therefore, the grandmother’s final gesture symbolizes society’s lack of genuine spirituality.

Further evidence that supports the notion that “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is a commentary on society’s lack of spirituality is its parallelism with Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales.” The stories conform so closely to one another that one must consider the possibility that Flannery O’Connor used the “Canterbury Tales,” or more specifically the “Pardoner’s Tale, as an outline for her own commentary about society’s lack of genuine spirituality. Notably, “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and the “Canterbury Tales” seek “to define the good man and good woman of their age within a Christian context” (Blythe & Sweet 1). The stories use a journey as a tool to determine and define a good man or woman. Pardoner’s and O’Connors parties encounter death because of their avarice of treasure. The Pardoner’s message “radix malorum est cupiditas” when loosely defined corresponds and strengthens O’Connors message.

Remarkably, the theme of “A Good Man is Hard to Find” centers around two developed characters. The grandmother and the Misfit are essentially the only characters of significance. The other characters such as June Star or Bailey Boy merely reflect O’Connor’s observations about society. The other characters have little affect on the central theme of the story. The Misfit and the grandmother seem to be the exact opposite. The grandmother seems to be “a harmless busybody, utterly self-absorbed but also amusing” (Bandy 2). The Misfit fits the stereotypical cast of an escaped convict. Ironically, their similarities will allegorize Flannery O’Connor’s notion that a good man or woman is hard to find.

A literal interpretation of the grandmother portrays an elderly southern woman attempting to maintain the proper and genteel values of the South. The grandmother places great importance on her appearance and the opinions of others. This importance is revealed at the beginning of their journey when the story compares the grandmother, a reflection of the past, to the daughter-in-law, a reflection of the present:

The children’s mother still had on slacks and still had her head tied up in a green kerchief, but the grandmother had on a navy blue straw sailor hat with a bunch of white violets on the brim and a navy blue dress with white dot in the print. Her collars and cuffs were white organdy trimmed with lace and at her neckline she had a pinned a purple spray of cloth violets containing a sachet. In case of an accident anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady (O’Connor 267).

Clearly the grandmother believes that how you look reflects what kind of person you are. The grandmother makes an effort to instill her “refined” values in her grandchildren. When the children insult the grandmother’s native state of Tennessee she scornfully replies “In my time children were more respectful of their native states of their parents and everything else” (O’Connor 268). A casual reading of the story illustrates an innocent elderly woman who is generally a good person.

The critics’ interpretation of the grandmother drastically differs from that of O’Connors. They view the grandmother as a self-absorbed prejudice woman “struggling with the shift from the antebellum values of lineage and gentility to those of a cash oriented culture” (Owens 1). This is hard for many readers to accept because she often invokes images of their own grandmother. Her prejudices are common among older southern individuals remember who times before the civil rights movement. The grandmother relishes in the humor of the watermelon she never received because a “nigger boy ate it when he saw the initials, E.A.T.” (O’Connor 269). She also casually remarks that a Negro child without pants would make a splendid picture to paint. The grandmother believes herself to be a patron of “social decorum in a world of barbarians” (Bandy 6). She often complains about the decay of respect and trust in today’s society. She honestly believes that everything in society including people “is getting terrible” (O’Connor 270). Her negative views of society make her “a woman with neither values nor morals, though she would be shocked to be told so” (Bandy 6). The grandmother’s self-absorbed nature and affinity with the antebellum social system indicates she too is evil.

The Misfit is the apotheosis of a lost soul engulfed by evil. He has a complete lack of religious faith. An example of this lack of faith is revealed when he responds to the grandmother’s request to pray by saying “I don’t want no