Murderous Redemption in Flannery O'Connor's Short Story "A Good Man is Hard To Find"
Flannery O'Connor's short story entitled "A Good Man is Hard to Find" tells the story of a rather unpleasant typical American family who meets their demise at the hands of a so-called Misfit or outlaw figure. The Misfit is clearly interested in religion, like many renegades. Before he enacts his revenge upon society, he speculates upon the morality of Jesus and the injustice of his previous confinement. This grotesque faith is not seen as hypocritical in the context of the tale, as it might in the eyes of another author. Rather O'Connor sees The Misfit as injecting spirituality into an otherwise morally bankrupt clan through the example he presents of thwarted spiritual longing and the injustice of modern, secular America.Before The Misfit turns against the family, the grandmother seems to apprehend, however reluctantly, some goodness in the heart of The Misfit. "Listen," the grandmother tells him, "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." (O'Connor, 1955, p. 15) The grandmother learns from speaking to the man who will eventually murder her that The Misfit believes he was poorly treated by society during his early life, which is why he is determined to
10) Hence the importance of the phrase "one of my babies" before the grandmother's death-the grandmother must transcend worldly ties to her biological kin and instead apprehend things on a higher level. They expose the sickness and corruption of society, but only in a violent fashion. The critic Martha Stephens agrees with Jones' assessment, however, stressing not the redemptive quality of O'Connor's fiction, but the fact that O'Connor's uses what Stephens calls "diseased" characters as vehicles of Christian grace. 112) Without the grandmother's gesture of understanding and her expression of the commonality between herself and the outlaw that is equal to her feelings for her son and grandchildren, O'Connor says, there would have "no story," simply a chronicle of a crime. This is what O'Connor means when The Misfit speaks the grandmother's epitaph to his less astute accomplice after he has murdered the family: "She would have been a good woman. 112)In other words, The Misfit redeems the grandmother, even though he is a kind of misplaced prophet or angel of death, given his flouting of the traditional religious commandments not to kill. This goes against the reading of The Misfit by critics such as Madison Jones who sees The Misfit as an example of a grotesque figure, or an avenger who is created not out of the goodness of the grandmother's vision that is innate to all persons, but out of a larger vision of societal nihilism. Criminals who show contempt for ordinary human life are the only persons who can bring about redemption in O'Connor's reading of what the author sees as a fallen world. O'Connor's own essay from Mystery and Manners on her short story suggests that the point of her tale of The Misfit is that every person is capable of redemption, even the grandmother, whom she sees as less spiritually gifted, in the end, than her killer.
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Acceptance Essays
