O’Connor Short Story – "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" (Spoiler Alert)

            At the beginning of this tale, O’Connor shows a family, or rather, a grandmother discussing their options for where they want to visit. The grandmother is “seizing at every chance to change” her son’s mind. Bailey, her son, is passively persuaded to thus alter their initial plans to go to Florida and turns instead to Tennessee to visit some of the grandmother’s relatives. As is apparently commonplace, grandmother gets her way, and the family is off the next morning. 

            As broken off with each individual as this family is, they seem pretty well-off, though living together. The mother has no real identity as she is continually seen throughout the story doing the same things: caring for the baby and dressed in slacks with a green headscarf around her head. She's presented as never saying a word, nor does she seem to hear. The children are portrayed as squabbling. The grandmother, on the other hand, dominates her son, Bailey, as he complacently agrees to her wishes. 

            Being off on the road, they encounter various scenes. At one point, they stop and visit “Red Sammy’s Famous Barbecue,” where they meet Sam. Amongst the talk "going around" is the escaped convict, the Misfit, who might be in the area, in the midst of which Red Sam interjects:

“ ‘That’ll do,’ Red Sam said. ‘Go bring these people their Co’-Colas,’ and the woman went off to get the rest of the order.

            ‘A good man is hard to find,’ Red Sammy said. ‘Everything is getting terrible. I remember the day you could go off and leave your screen door unlatched. Not no more.’ ”

 

And so the talk continues as they eat, and Red Sam herein states the theme of O’Connor’s story. "A good man is hard to find."

            The family continues down the road, and along the way they get into a car accident, caused by none other than the grandmother’s ironic startling of her own cat, and they wreck on the side of the road. Thereafter, they encounter the Misfit, who begins to talk with them. He casually takes each of them aside, and the other, to kill them. In the end, each is shot, finishing with the very irritating grandmother: 

“She saw the man’s face twisted close to her own as if he were going to cry and she murmured, ‘why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!’ She reached out and touched him on the shoulder. The Misfit sprang back as if a snake had bitten him and shot her three times in the chest.”  

 

A good man is hard to find. The implication: a good man is impossible to find.  

        The irony of the family's final moments betrays the fact that the grandmother, though outwardly religious and polite, is inwardly "full of dead men's bones," to borrow the Lord Jesus' assessment of the broken pharisaical system, which most strongly opposed Jesus in the Bible itself. The twisted murderer is equally immoral as he leads "hypocrites" to their deaths while questioning them on philosophical matters, as if he actually did care.