Summary:
Evaluates Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man Is Hard to Find. Considers how the character, The Misfit, equates with the devil. Describes how O'Connor seems to hope he can change because of "the old lady's gesture." Looks closely both the Misfit and his reactions to the old lady.
O'Connor made The misfit vulnerable in his character by identifying us to the old lady's hope for potential. However, in the process, she must have caused him some sort of emotional turmoil to cause him to end her life at such an unexpected moment. The thought of The Misfit's mother must have been a touchy subject; he didn't mention her once in the entire conversation, which consisted entirely of him degrading her talk about Jesus, his dad and his life story. Therefore, when she related to him as her son and reached out and touched his shoulder, he didn't know how to react and took it as hurt.
The old lady's gesture was obviously one of kindness. She wasn't reaching out to him in a cruel sort of way; she simply reached out and touched him on the shoulder. In her kindness, she might have been trying to get him to see the error of his ways. However, she probably went about it in the wrong way. Telling him to pray more when he quite obviously thought that he was a man of God probably wasn't the best idea.
Maybe she was hoping to get him to get him to see that if he didn't kill her the maybe he could "settle down and live a comfortable life and not have to think about somebody chasing you all the time", as she put it.
Maybe what she said to him didn't affect him at that point in time, but it probably hit him at some point down the road. Like O'Connor said, it grew like a "mustard seed", because she caused him emotional turmoil.
What O'Connor was hoping when she wrote the story was to get us to see that just because people are bad for a portion of their lividest mean that they are going to be bad for the rest of their lives; these people are completely capable of change.
When she wrote the story she didn't mean for it to be "grotesque", as she says it has been called, but as she puts it, " I prefer to call it literal." She compares her story to a simple child's drawing (obviously trying it easier for the world to understand), saying that a child draws nothing but what he sees. She also says that the child sees the lines that create motion. She goes further to say that the "lines of motion that interest the writer are usually invisible" that they are usually lines of spiritual motion. O'Connor tells us that we should be looking for the grace in the grandmother's soul and not the corpses, so obviously the murder's were just her way to get her message across to us.
O'Connor didn't want us to focus on The Misfit as a murderer; she wanted us to focus on him as a kind of prophet that hadn't found his calling in life yet. She wants to look at the violence in the story not as evil, but rather look at how it is used as a sort of moral. She uses violence in her story hoping that The Misfit will remember that hand on his shoulder for the rest of his life, "eternity," and that he will change his life because of what the grandmother said to him.
All O'Connor wanted when she wrote this story was for people to realize that The Misfit wasn't a bad person at all, only that he hadn't seen what he was meant to do in life yet. O'Connor used the grandmother to help plant "the seed" in his heart, hoping that it would someday grow.
This is the complete article, containing 598 words
(approx. 2 pages at 300 words per page).
