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The title of this story is also the title of O’Connor’s first collection of short stories.  Told in third-person, the focus is on the Grandmother’s perspective of events. O’Connor does a brilliant job of foreshadowing, entertaining, shocking, and forcing the reader to ask difficult questions. She is relentless in her depiction of these characters—they are not likable. And so, by creating such annoying, unsympathetic characters, O’Connor has carefully set the premise for her main argument: the grace of God is for everyone; even the most unlikable.

The story begins when a family packs up their car and heads south from Tennessee to Florida for a family vacation.  The family is as annoying to the reader as they are to each other.  The Grandmother is the most annoying of them all.  She complains that she doesn’t want to go, but she’s the first one ready to go.  She sneaks her cat into the car, even though she’s been told not to bring it along, and she wears her best dress and hat—in case she winds up dead on the side of the road, she explains, people will know she was a lady.  Along the way the family stops to eat and the Grandmother gets into a conversation with the proprietor about a convict on the loose—he is known as The Misfit.

Through this character, The Misfit, O’Connor explores the Christian concept of “grace”—that a divine pardon from God is available simply for the asking. In the story, it is the Grandmother—a small-minded, cantankerous, and bossy old woman—who realizes grace at the moment of her death, when she reaches out to the Misfit and all of a sudden sees him as one of her own children. For O’Connor, God’s grace is a power outside the character, a moment of epiphany. Nonetheless, her characters are usually too stubborn or unwilling to acknowledge the grace of God.

Quote from A Good Man is Hard to Find:

“The Grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey’s mind. Bailey was the son she lived with, her only boy. He was sitting on the edge of his chair at the table, bent over the orange sports section of the Journal. “Now look here, Bailey,” she said, “see here, read this,” and she stood with one hand on her thin hip and the other rattling the newspaper at his bald head. “Here this fellow that calls himself The Misfit is aloose from the Federal Pen and headed toward Florida and you read here what it says he did to these people. Just you read it. I wouldn’t take my children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it. I couldn’t answer to my conscience if I did.”

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A Good Man is Hard to Find:  Texts and Contexts

Read our bio of Flannery O’Connor and peruse her other books.