Good Man Is Hard to Term Paper

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She does so initially through semi-sincere flattery: "you shouldn't call yourself The Misfit because I know you're a good man at heart. I can just look at you and tell," (147). Later, she gets under the Misfit's skin by touching him, an act that causes him to shoot her.

It is precisely the Grandmother's willful desire to control other people and situations that the entire family ends up dead. For example, it was the Grandmother's fault that Bailey took the wrong turn; in fact the Grandmother uses cunning lies to lure the family into going to visit the plantation: "There was a secret panel in this house,' she said craftily, not telling the truth but wishing that she were," (143).
When she realized her error, she did not admit it, preferring to remain in control of the situation. Her silent embarrassment caused the accident that led to the encounter with the Misfit.

Although the Grandmother doesn't actually do much in the short story, her words and her manipulative nature lead to disaster. The ironic tension between the Grandmother's anonymity and her importance; her stubbornness and her willfulness; her being stuck in the past and her dramatically altering the future create the tension necessary in a creepy, murderous short story such as "A Good Man is Hard to Find."

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Flannery O’Connor’s short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” details a road trip gone wrong, as a southern family steers themselves right into the hands of a serial killer. The protagonist is a grandmother with skewed social values and norms, as well as the beginnings of cognitive impairment or dementia. When she mistakenly tells her son to head to the wrong state to find a house from her distant memories, the grandmother sets in motion a chain of events that leads to the death of her whole family. Using violent imagery, Flannery O’Connor… Continue Reading...

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