"A Good Man Is Hard to Find" Analysi

A moment of skepticism may shatter a lifetime of faith. Such is the paradox of human agency: where it embraces the possibility that life has purpose, it can always acknowledge that it doesn’t. This ontology courses through Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” (1955); a family dies at the hands of an outcast, and the ethics of heaven and society are faced with denial in their existence. This denial, however, is remarkably one-sided; though the Misfit rejects the grandmother for believing in a morality of dubious truth, his alternative of “No pleasure but meanness” (O’Connor, 51) is itself a declaration not just of truth but of inherent cruelty. The Misfit’s conclusion seems paradoxical. However, the discrepancy is misleading. It is precisely because he appeals to “meanness” that the Misfit’s philosophy is not self-undoing; in a universe where the good is unknown, arbitrary conflict becomes the one reality that may exist as non-arbitrary fact.

At the story’s onset, this philosophical question is largely unseen. Instead, O’Connor introduces characters in light of their perspective on the world. In particular, the grandmother becomes symbolic of self-propagating ethics, her confidence in the word of God sustaining her strict adherence to the codes of a “lady.” Although her attempts to dissuade Bailey from taking the family to Florida are selfish in nature, the grandmother adopts a moral perspective in her arguments. Warning that “‘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’” (O’Connor, 31), the grandmother reveals the personal force of her ethical worldview: the action is wrong not necessarily out of objective reasons but because of the discomfort it would provide to her conscience. The difference is subtle yet revealing; even a lifetime of encouragement to embrace morality for its own sake is overshadowed by the influence of emotion. O’Connor adds a...