Tag: A Good Man is Hard to Find

Grace, Jesus, and Parenting in Flannery O’Conner’s story “A Good Man is Hard to Find”

Flannery O’Connor’s story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” has a family road trip, a supremely annoying grandmother, and a terrifying encounter with the philosophical serial killer, The Misfit.

Did you think The Misfit was literally the Grandmother’s son? Does it matter? We would love to hear from you on that one.

Flannery O’Connor’s story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” has a family road trip, a supremely annoying grandmother, and a terrifying encounter with the philosophical serial killer, The Misfit. If you’ve ever been haunted by the final pages or wondered what O’Connor was really trying to say about faith and family, this episode is for you.

What We Tangle With in This Episode

  • Christianity and the The Story’s Climax: Is this story trying to tell us something essential about Christianity? We look closely at the fates of the Grandmother and The Misfit and ask: what do their terrifying final moments suggest about O’Connor’s views on grace and redemption?
  • The Misfit’s Proclamation: We try to unpack arguably the story’s most quoted and disturbing line: what does The Misfit mean when he says the Grandmother “would have been a good woman… if there had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life”?
  • Defining Southern Gothic: We explore how O’Connor uses the grotesque, the religious, and the darkly comedic to define this unique regional style.
  • The Significance of Names: Anne and I dig into the names, especially the bratty, unforgettable children: June Star, and the heavily symbolic John Wesley (named after the founder of Methodism).
  • The Grandmother, Ourselves, and Parenting: We break down the Grandmother’s character—her superficiality, her nostalgia, and her capacity for a fleeting moment of true grace. This led us to a discussion of our own grandmothers, and the difficult topic of parenting in the face of the children’s behavior in the story.

Literary Context

  • The Misfit and Anton Chigurh: We drew a parallel between The Misfit and other cold, philosophical villains, notably Anton Chigurh from Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men.
  • Sufjan Stevens’s Song: Did you know musician Sufjan Stevens wrote a song titled “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” for his album Seven Swans? We discuss how it’s told from the villain’s perspective, further showing the Misfit’s cultural grip.
  • O’Connor’s Background: We touched on the life of Flannery O’Connor, a Southern Catholic who died young at 39 from lupus (like her father). Knowing her intense faith informs the brutal spiritual clarity she brings to the page.

Come ride along with us as we discuss the ultimately deadly back roads of Flannery O’Connor’s dark genius.

Thanks for checking out this episode!

Why Set a Story in a Cemetery?

I used to go sledding as a child in a cemetery where several of my family members and at least one friend are buried.  That experience helped deliver to me some of the materials for my story “Suicide Hill.”  In planning this story set in a cemetery, my thoughts went to my own eventual death, and I got to thinking about what sort of life I might feel satisfied having lived.  Those thoughts took me to the death of my grandfather, a man I admired for his quiet personality but very action oriented brand of love.  He was the sort of man who grew tomatoes and took them around to his friends, the sort of man who drove children two hours south to the hospital in Indianapolis when they would have otherwise had trouble getting there.   I also thought of the lives of all the other people I knew who were buried near my grandfather.

novel-in-stories, linked, collection, short story
This Hill Gets Steeper in My Story

In writing “Suicide Hill,” I made up a character who ended up with very poor attendance at his funeral.  I also placed a protagonist who’d been paid to carry the casket.  Then I tried to become that character and see what he thought about the low attendance.   When I finished the first draft of the story six or so years ago, I didn’t really think it much mattered if a person had anyone at their funeral or not.  I mean, who cares?  But I couldn’t make that “who cares” ending work for me, and I’ve found that I care very much about the way my wife and daughters would remember me should I die.  I think “Suicide Hill” and my novel Love on the Big Screen both also reflect my notion that love ought to contain logical and emotional features.

“Suicide Hill” was the story I submitted to Georgia College and State University as a writing sample when I wanted to undertake a study in fiction writing.  That and my teaching experiences were probably just enough to convince somebody on the school’s faculty to let me come get to work.   (it sure wasn’t the GRE score).

Once in graduate school, even though the first text I had written was a novel and I wanted to revise it for my thesis, I found the courses I was taking mostly called for stories.  As I went to class and taught class, I worked on my divorce novel  on my own time and wrote new stories for the workshops:  “Every Word I Said,” “Aloe For the Burn,” and “Friends at the Table,” were all stories I wrote during my time at Georgia College and State University in Milledgeville.  Those are all stories that appear in my forthcoming collection Horseshoe.

Home of Flannery O'Connor from 1951 to 1964

As for Milledgeville and GCSU, it’s a town and college that take great pride in being the home of Flannery O’Connor, and even before I ever moved to Georgia, O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” was one of my favorites.  That’s saying a lot–that she’d written a story I knew–since I wasn’t much a short story reader back then.  O’Connor’s character “The Misfit” takes on nearly comic-book or super-anti-hero qualities for me, and her themes connected to guilt, violence, and Christianity are also ideas that I find myself often in conversation with.   I’d say they are some of the major themes in the Horseshoe collection.