In the story "A Good Man Is Hard To Find," Flannery O'Connor attempt to show her readers of the error of their humanistic assumptions and their limitless need for God's grace. She does this through the implicit comparison of a little old lady and a serial killer, the Misfit. Most reader would assume that the old woman should represents a qualified sort of goodness and the Misfit represent evil; I, however, would hold precisely the reverse. Most reader would contend that the old woman represents life and the Misfit death; again, I would hold the opposite, believing that the old woman's grace-less life was a living death, and that through the Misfit she gained a chance of attaining salvation.
             The story opens as the little old lady's family is planning to leave on a vacation. But there is nothing sweet about this domestic scene; neither the old woman nor her grown son, Bailey, are able to command any respect from Bailey's impudent children, and we sense a tension between the strong-willed Bailey and his tremendously self-righteous mother. The grandmother tries unsuccessfully to convince Bailey that hey ought to visit her relations in East Tennessee, and failing this, she bring her cat along on the Florida trip, despite the fact that she knows how much the cat annoys Bailey. The rest of the family is no improvement; Bailey's wife is a non-entity, as is the baby, and the two older children are simply brats. The family is out of sync with themselves, and, perhaps out of sync with God.
             Nevertheless, throughout the story the grandmother repeatedly talks about "goodness." On the trip, she is exquisitely dressed, because "In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once she was a lady" (O'Connor, 854). She identifies this gentility as a quality that is past, and which is symbolized by an old plantation she is trying to direct the family back...