A Story I Loved: “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” by Flannery O'Connor
I don't know if I particularly like Flannery O'Connor's characters. There's something almost aggressively unpleasant about them, something that makes reading her stories feel a little like being trapped at a family dinner with people you can't stand. In “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” the grandmother is vain, irritating, and almost impressively oblivious. The children are awful. The parents aren't much better. For the first half of the story, I found myself wondering why O'Connor had assembled such a thoroughly disagreeable group of people, and why I was enjoying myself so much.
I think O'Connor is very funny. This isn't always the first thing people mention about her, partly because of the violence, and partly because her Catholicism tends to dominate discussions of her work. But her humor is essential to the story. There's a certain pleasure in watching the grandmother talk, in seeing how completely she misunderstands the people around her. She believes herself to be a good person, which is different, of course, from actually being one. Most of her ideas about morality seem to have been inherited from a particular social world, one concerned with manners and appearances and knowing the right sorts of people. It's an awfully limited understanding of goodness. But it's also a fairly common one.
What interests me about the grandmother is that she doesn't really change until the very end. O'Connor allows her to remain ridiculous for almost the entire story. Even when the Misfit appears, and the situation becomes increasingly desperate, she continues to rely on the same social instincts that have guided her through everything else. She tries to convince him that he's a good man. She talks about his family. It's almost embarrassing to read, the way she keeps trying to turn a murderer into somebody she might have met at church.
The Misfit is a different matter. He's probably the most interesting character in the story, and certainly the most disturbing. I like the way O'Connor gives him a genuine intellectual life. He's not especially interested in money, or revenge, or any of the usual motivations that might make a murderer easier to understand. He's preoccupied with Jesus, with punishment, with the possibility that the universe operates according to some moral logic that has somehow escaped him. He seems to have thought about these things considerably more than the grandmother has.
And yet, for all his thinking, he's arrived at a fairly terrible conclusion.
I wonder how much of O'Connor's worldview depends on this distinction, between people who believe without understanding and people who understand enough to find belief impossible. The grandmother's religion is almost entirely superficial. The Misfit takes religion seriously, perhaps more seriously than anybody else in the story. Neither of them seems particularly happy. Neither seems particularly good.
I've read that O'Connor considered the grandmother's final gesture a moment of grace. I can see why. When she reaches toward the Misfit and recognizes him as one of her own children, there's a sudden intimacy that hasn't existed anywhere else in the story. For once, she's not talking about social position, or good breeding, or any of the other things that have occupied her. She's simply recognizing another person.
But I don't know. I find it difficult to separate that moment from the fact that she's about to be killed. Maybe that's unfair to the grandmother. People are capable of sincere feeling under desperate circumstances, and perhaps desperation is what allows her to see clearly for the first time. Still, I don't find the distinction particularly easy to make. I'm not sure O'Connor does either, at least not entirely.
There's also something rather ruthless about the way O'Connor treats revelation. Her characters seem to require an extraordinary amount of suffering before they're permitted any real understanding of themselves. I understand that this is partly theological, that violence in her fiction often serves as the instrument of grace. But I can't help feeling a little suspicious of it. It's a convenient arrangement for a writer, to have every catastrophe carry the possibility of spiritual significance. Real life is not always so generous.
I suppose what I admire most about the story is that none of these questions interfere with its ability to be entertaining. It's a very strange, very funny piece of fiction, and it doesn't feel especially concerned with whether the reader likes anybody in it. O'Connor has an extraordinary confidence in her own characters, in their ugliness and stupidity and occasional flashes of perception. She knows exactly what she's doing with them.
Read "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" here:
