A central theme in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” evolves around a concern with justice in the world. Based on a family trip to Florda, an accident, and encounter with an assassin, the plot advances this idea in an implicit statement about the improper values we use to guide our conduct and the potential for dire consequences inherent in such conduct. This humanist preoccupation also speaks to the religious and moral codes that have the potential to make life more fulfilling. The story suggests that higher principles govern human lives and ought to influence the way individuals relate to others. Via these suggestions, O’Connor invites readers to eschew self-indulgent narcissism in favor of tolerance and respect.
Elevating herself above what she regards as the common class, ultimately declaring herself a “lady,” the Grandmother, the major character, favors herself as an embodiment of Southern gentility and civilized graces. Moral merit, in her estimation, is severed from empathetic human conduct. The values she asserts are superficial and distorted. She is so totally wrapped up in herself that she can be motivated to recognize others only when those persons threaten her vanity.
She confuses goodness, or moral merit, with being a lady (social status), and idealizes class snobbery and vanity as a mode of social sophistication. Parading her inflated ego before the Misfit, she proposes that intrinsic virtue inheres in being a lady; and such a being deserves exceptional consideration. Such superficial and misguided criteria of worth she publicizes further, calling the Misfit a good man because he lacks “common blood.” While class designation is not a legitimate determinant of virtue, the story reminds us, aristocratic birth had historically been used as a criterion for social and racial discrimination. Moral impropriety or badness was conjoined to being poor and uneducated, these groups often castigated as inherently criminal. It is ironically apt that the Misfit, the unapologetic villain in this story, looks like an intellectual. Moreover, it is he who brings the Grandmother to consciousness of her true identity as a sponsor of evil. His reassessments awaken her to the reality that good and evil are functions of behavior and are not intrinsic qualities anyone inherits biologically or as a result of social rank.
Contrary to this the Grandmother proposes that she would have been more of a lady had she married Mr. Teagarden since he has made a lot of money. While her own experience indicts this false belief, she remains impervious. The letters “E.A.T.” her suitor engraved in the watermelon prompted confusion rather than offered clear and unambiguous direction for human action. An issue here is that in pursuing life on the basis of superficial codes, we encourage misjudgment and misdirection.
It is this tenuous frame of values that motivates the Grandmother. In that her primary goal is to draw attention to herself, she schemes, exaggerates, lies, and manipulates. She fails to operate at any meaningful intellectual or moral depth. Her initial manipulation, her effort to persuade Bailey to abandon his trip simply to satisfy her, and her calculated obsession with the Misfit dramatize the criminal misconduct to which she is prone. One one level, the Misfit is an alter ego, an outer manifestation of her warped conscience. She shows no greater depth of understanding than the spoiled children June Star and John Wesley, whose misbehavior she incites. That shallowness is emphasized when, moreover, she abjures responsibility for her error regarding the plantation and cultivates self-pity, wishing to be injured in order to avoid blame.
Crucial to the moral lesson plotted here is that to cultivate depth, to develop moral strength as responsible social beings, we must go through a process regarded as the shearing of ego. This issue underscores the theme of justice, the story justifying why the family members deserve their fates. Each is a product of the moral miasma that radiates from the Grandmother; these are all her “babies,” each family member spiritually crippled, essentially, as socially maladjusted as the Misfit. Her son, Bailey, and his wife (the mother) are feckless. Rather than guide and train or discipline the children, they indulge and spoil them. Consequently, the children’s names ironically come into conflict with their inner beings. Their personalities veer sharply away from the ideal of innocence or goodness associated with childhood.
At the same time, the name John Wesley, a historical reference to a preacher, associates the boy with central Christian tenets of peace, love, and tolerance. Remarkably no one in the family acknowledges these moral codes. Moreover, John Wesley, the preacher, also supported slavery, his hypocrisy underscoring the idea that the pervasive social and moral breakdown makes it hard to find a good person even as many pay persistent lip service to goodness and pretend to value religious and moral guidance.
Additionally, while the name June Star hints of light and beauty, ultimately a transcendent visionary perspective, the girl shows no respect for adult authority. Her unpleasantness to Red Sammy’s wife at The Tower restaurant relays the threat of a dark underside that stymies the potential light and promise of youth. Insult and self-indulgence are twisted to serve as self-assertive attributes. Her calling Bobby Lee a pig suggests, collectively, that these characters live so far outside of reality, they cannot detect what is proper behavior in any situation. The plot shows that over and over, the main characters’ own evil actions put them in danger. Yet they can’t recognize the hazards they face.
John Wesley’s boast that he’d smack the Misfit’s face further addresses the noxious narcissism and blinding delusions that dominate this wrecked community. It also has turned violence into a panacea; violence not Christian love is seen as the ready solution to rid the world of all its problems. Consequently both children express great delight during the accident, wishing that the Grandmother was killed. These behaviors indicate the extent to which the family is traveling, literally and figuratively, to its doom; for it evidently refuses to face responsibly, and seek to correct, the evil within it. That buried evil (identified to a certain extent with the cat) destroys it.
While the Misfit is conscious of his displacement, the family members are not; and the plot, climaxing on the words of the Misfit to the Grandmother, concretize the dramatic process of evolving karma. The death-ritual is indicative of their failed initiation. They are brought to self-recognition and made to face their spiritual deaths--a point they all implicitly arrive at at the moment of being shot. The Misfit, in his battered “hearse,” is an image of the grim reaper, the ultimate arbiter of justice.
While appearing unorthodox and twisted, the Misfit acts, ironically, also as the voice of social consciousness and conscience. He sees through the Grandmother’s (ultimately the whole family’s) falsity and is appalled at the level of her selfish, manipulative, and dangerously deceitful behavior. That danger is symbolically identified with the cat, the evil, she tries to suppress under a veneer of respectability and that readily escapes and causes harm to herself and others. To him she also appears as a snake. The Grandmother’s evolving self-awareness is cryptically relayed in her remark that the Misfit is one of her babies. He, symbolically, is a product of the kind of insensitivity or evil birthed by such uncharitable individuals as the Grandmother. Ironically he now wears the shirt that one of her babies (her son Bailey) wore. But unlike Bailey, he is no parrot—the bird symbols on the shirt. He has learnt to sign for himself, to be autonomous—to examine the evil around him in order to chart his own direction.
He patently thus recalls his father’s words, “It’s some that can live their whole life out without asking about it and it’s others has to know why it is, and this boy is one of the latters.” These words underscore the essential conflict in the story between the conscious and the unconscious. The former seek to penetrate, intellectually and spiritually, to the mysteries and confusions of life in order to arrive at some deeper knowledge of self and world, and therefore to live. The latter settle naively in the ego; they give themselves no real chance to penetrate beyond the surface and thus plumb the depths of being. The entire family exists on this latter superficial level, a condition of death that the story’s climactic ending dramatizes.
The detail that the Grandmother’s hat brim falls off touches on this idea that vanity, the fragile façade she seeks to keep up, fails her. She is exposed, stripped naked, and rendered vulnerable because of the inept values she adopts. Her way out of the predicament is to seek to bribe the Misfit with money. However, he tells her that no body can give undertaker a tip, implying that she is already dead. She has fallen back on material things to compensate for a spirit that is corrupted and dysfunctional.
In accusing Jesus of throwing things off balance, The Misfit expresses wariness over discriminatory practices we accept rather than question, and that warp individuals like the Grandmother, a channel of misguided religious attitudes. Disturbed by the belief that exceptionalism is the way to the Godhead, he charges Christ with setting a confusing precedent that encourages individuals to think they can attain spiritual treasures through special favors. The epigraph further addresses this anxiety: “The dragon is by the side of the road, watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you. We go to the Father of Souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon.” The initiate must get past the life-devouring “dragon” to reach the inner treasure. The spirit questor must circumvent the beast (the evil force identified with the Grandmother’s ego or superiority complex) that denies access to the treasure. In teaching ourselves and our “babies” proper values, we cultivate forms of goodness or secure the spiritual prizes we correctly identify with God-being or goodness.
The adventure toward this goal has derailed, as “A Good Man” implies. The sense of openness and altruism that should evolve in us as we grow devolves into narcissism, the seeker’s perception of being better than his neighbor. It is this distortion that makes each life-journey hazardous. For those who refuse to go below the surface where they bury the truths of themselves and in this process get a glimpse of who they truly are, jeopardize their own well-being as well as the potential for happiness of others around them. It is this message that helps explain the Misfit’s words that the Grandmother needs frequently to be shot in order to be good. She and her babies (her entire family) had to face the “dragon,” the dangerous inner self that stymies the individual’s progress and inhibits moral self-evaluation in the world.
The Misfit seems to recognize and understand the grandmother's negative qualities after only a few minutes of being in her company. She does not filter her thoughts, and most of what she has to say is self-serving, not taking into account other people's needs, thoughts, or feelings. It is arguable that because she blurts out that she recognizes the Misfit he quickly decides to kill the family and take their car.
When the Misfit says that the grandmother might have been a good person if someone had been there to shoot her every moment of her life, it seems that he recognizes that she isn't a bad person at heart, but she needs someone to save her from herself. Her lack of a filter and controlling nature makes her very hard to deal with, but if someone had been there to keep her in check, she might have learned to consider others instead of manipulating them. Insisting on the detour to the plantation and bringing the cat along that causes the accident sets in motion the chain of events that leads to the family's destruction.
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