A Good Man is Hard to find
Flannery O'Connor's short story collection A Good Man is Hard to Find has many elements of a southern gothic work. Images of ancient castles with sliding panels create suspicious themes and settings that lead the readers into the dark and gloomy world of the southern United States. With all of the violence, horror, and dismal surroundings presented in O'Connor's stories there is too a moral message given. Later gothic work did not always explain horror like this, holding little moral value to contrast their grotesque images (notes, November 1). O'Connor's stories do include a strong moral element, frequently in the form of religious explanations. The characters within A Good Man is Hard to Find are usually ignorant and self-satisfying people, who come across "the grotesque" and are shocked into self-realization, no longer self-satisfied. These grotesque elements are usually the divine in disguise forcing the characters into introspection. In a letter Flannery O'Connor w!rote she stated: "You have found Christ when you are concerned with other people's suffering and not your own." In this quotation we can see the moral message O'Connor was attempting to convey in her stories, and through further analysis of the work this
"Think of the thousands of them, think of the box cars and the ovens and the camps and the sick children and Christ !Our Lord (O'Connor, pg. In a quotation Hulga compares Pointer's escape over a "green speckled lake. By returning her to the state of a child the Misfit has given her a sort of rebirth and a new fresh outlook on life. Guziac does not care about race and only wants to bring the rest of his family over to save them from hardships in Europe. The Displaced Person is more advanced than any of them. When Hulga's glasses are off she sees the landscape of the farm to be more beautiful than she has ever believed. you've got good blood, Jesus, you ought not to shoot a lady". The grandmother learns a moral lesson from! the Misfit, who has rejected her morals.
Common topics in this essay:
Misfit O'Connor,
Red Sammy,
Secondly Pointer's,
Nelson Head,
Flannery O'Connor's,
Misfit Jesus,
McIntyre Guziac,
People Hulga,
Artificial Nigger,
Europe McIntyre,
o'connor pg,
displaced person,
country people,
moral message,
red sammy,
grotesque elements,
notes november,
o'connor's moral,
notes november 8,
o'connor's stories,
nelson doesn't,
o'connor's moral message,
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Acceptance Essays
