SOURCE: Owens, Mitchell. “The Function of Signature in ‘A Good Is Hard to Find.’” Studies in Short Fiction 33, no. 1 (winter 1996): 101-6.

In the following essay, Owens contends that the grandmother's attachment of excessive significance to signatures in O'Connor's short story is a sign of her adherence to an archaic value system in the face of sweeping social change.

Sometimes a man says things he don't mean.

(O'Connor 127)

In her fatal encounter with The Misfit, the grandmother in Flannery O'Connor's “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” confronts a particularly lethal manifestation of her changing social order. Throughout her life, this woman has been struggling with the shift from the ante-bellum values of lineage and gentility to those of a cash-oriented culture, and with the implications this shift has for the assumptions that underwrite her vanishing system of beliefs. While she does not accept or even fully comprehend these...