Fiction Friday: A Good Man Is Hard To Find by Flannery O’Connor

In her short story, A Good Man is Hard To Find, Flannery O’Connor casts doubt on the Modern paradigms of family, class, and religion as taproots of grace and goodness, and suggests a source more disturbingly alien.

Through the narrator we follow the main character, a well-mannered grandmother working to steer her family toward a simple life of respect and dignity. However, we quickly discover a vacuum of goodness among all the characters. Bailey, the grandmother’s son is ill mannered and disinterested; the grandchildren, despite their names (John Wesley, a reference to the Anglican founder of the Methodist movement, and June Star, perhaps a reference to Christ himself, born in June and heralded by a star) are spoiled and intolerable; and the children’s mother is apparently so inconsequential she doesn’t even warrant a name. Even the grandmother is self-important, and manipulative, and blind to her own prejudice.

O’Connor’s poetically sparse style and adept use of regional dialect make for an earthy and accessible story. Yet, it is O’Connor’s true-to-life human insights that make the story thoroughly believable, and it’s her ironic juxtapositions that make it both memorable and wickedly funny.

Still, make no mistake, reading A Good Man is Hard To Find isn’t always easy, even if it’s always compelling. O’Connor causes intentional conflicts within the reader, making us part of the story. The first disturbance is simply that nobody in this story is good. This can be difficult to stomach. We’re accustomed to hero tales and epic battles between good and evil. We spend the entire story searching for a good man – or woman – in vain. But there are no good men or women in this story – only grumpy, self-absorbed, and pathological men, women, and children. The impression is so pervasive we might complain that it simply isn’t realistic, except for one thing – these melancholy depictions ring so true. And that is the second disturbing discovery; in these wretched characters we recognize our own grandmothers, our own children, and especially our own selves on the pages of prose.

O’Connor saved her most difficult disturbances for the end when the family come face-to-face with a thoroughly southern version of the devil called “The Misfit.” Full of fear, the grandmother preaches Jesus, but the moralistic deism of her version of Jesus makes no sense to this man, who dismisses her appeals to salvation while admiting he longs to know the truth about Christ, saying, “I wasn’t there so I can’t say he didn’t [raise the dead] […] if I had been there I would have known and I wouldn’t be like I am now.” In some ways The Misfit takes Jesus more seriously than the grandmother, and he is moved to sorrow by this confession of ignorance. But because he can’t see Christ, he can’t see past his own entrapment and be redeemed by a radically gracious love. Hence, we discover at this climactic moment that Christ himself is the “good man” that is “hard to find.”

Yet, someone does find this Christ. The irony of the ending is that the grandmother seeks to save the The Misfit and save her own life, but it is her who ends up being saved through her own death. In a moment of clarity she surrenders and sees that her and The Misfit are the same (“Why, you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!”). All pretension falls away and she connects with something alien, something other, a source of inexplicable grace that empowers her to reach out in one last pure act and accept this grotesque man to herself. In so doing, O’Connor has compellingly rendered the peculiar story of human depravity and redemption at the hands of a scandalously gracious God.

O’Connor is not for everyone. Her prose is straightforward and bears little ornamentation. However, for those willing to look face the darkness of humanity found in her stories, the light of the gospel shines ever brighter through moments of enduring grace. More than anything else, revealing grace, not just grittiness, was Flannery O’Connor’s gift.

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