"Love follows knowledge."
"Beauty above all beauty!"
– St. Catherine of Siena

Thursday, July 2, 2020

Short Story Analysis: A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor, Part 2

This is the second part of a series on Flannery O'Connor's short story, "A Good Man is Hard to Find." You can find Part 1 here.  

Let me push the discussion a little further, into a reading that perhaps no one has considered.  Let’s look at the encounter between the grandmother and the Misfit not from realism, but from a metaphorical, even symbolic, perspective.  You might even call this reading a metaphysical perspective.  Keep in mind, this reading doesn’t undermine the realism, but amplifies it.  It creates another level to action than the immediate.


By all rights, when a car flips 360 degrees into a ten foot deep ditch and passengers are not even wearing seatbelts as they wouldn’t in the 1950s, it is very likely people in the car would have died.  You don’t walk away from accidents like that.  Let’s say, metaphysically, they have died and unbeknownst to them they are dead and waiting for what comes next.  The family is sitting in a ditch, ten feet deep, which is not exactly the six feet of a burial, but O’Connor may not want to make it obvious.  But they are below ground.  Behind the ditch are woods.  O’Connor describes them as “tall and dark and deep.”  That language is an allusion to a famous poem by Robert Frost, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”  That poem is ultimately about death (silence of isolation, snow as symbol for death, frozen lake recalls the lake in Dante’s Inferno).  Read the last stanza:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

O’Connor’s echo of “dark and deep” is not accidental.  The grandmother has gone on a journey of many miles, her vacation as we have seen; you can even stretch that to her life time, and now she has come to a stop.  Along comes a “big black battered hearse-like automobile” which contains beings (angels?) who are going to bring her and the family to their final end.  “There was not a cloud in the sky nor any sun.”  We hear that several times.  How could there be no cloud in the sky and no sun?  We are in a state of another world.  They look up and it’s the heavens.  They are in another plane, somewhere in between earth and heaven.  They are going before the final judge.

So that would make the Misfit, the executer of that judgement, and that would be Jesus Christ.  The Misfit even compares himself to Jesus at one point.  “Jesus thown everything off balance,” the Misfit says.  “It was the same case with Him as with me except He hadn’t committed any crime…”  Well, the Misfit has thrown everything off balance too, and he clearly links himself to Jesus.  Just before that connection to Jesus Bobby Lee throws him the shirt with the parrots on it.  Parrots have been used as representative for the Holy Spirit at least since Gustave Flaubert’s story “A Simple Heart,”  about a hundred years prior to O’Connor writing hers.  We saw parrots as suggestive of the Holy Spirit in Willa Cather’s novel Death of the Archbishop.  O’Connor was very conscious of great writers, and I’m sure she read Flaubert’s story since it had a Catholic dimension to it.  So the tossed shirt with the parrots flying onto the Misfit is certainly suggestive of the Holy Spirit coming onto him.  And then the Misfit puts on the shirt.  This is all very symbolic action.

But it goes even beyond that.  Notice that the Misfit is squatting down the whole time he is speaking to the grandmother.  “The Misfit squatted down to the ground,” we are told early in the encounter.  The whole time the Misfit is speaking to her he is doodling on the ground with the butt of his gun.  “The Misfit kept scratching in the ground with the butt of his gun as if he were thinking about it.”  Even just before the end he hits the ground with his fist. The Misfit squatting and writing on the ground parallels Jesus in John chapters seven and eight with the woman taken in adultery to be stoned.  There too a woman’s fate hangs in the balance while Jesus writes in the sand.  If Jesus agrees with the men who intend to stone her, she is doomed.

What we see in this symbolic reading is the grandmother coming before judgement, and the fate of her soul hanging in the balance.

No, the Misfit is not Jesus, but O’Connor is using the Misfit to expand the meaning of the story.  Remember in this reading, she is already dead from the car accident. The bullets are not what causes the death, but what decides her judgement.  The question then that beckons us is, what is her judgement: Saved or damned?

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My Reply to Susan Margret to why the other characters don’t receive a judgemtn like the grandmother;

Susan, as a short story, the focus is usually on one or two characters. There just isn't space enough to develop and bring to a conclusion secondary characters. The rest of the family are there to move the plot. Each successive execution in the woods is a means for the author to "turn the screw," as Henry James would say, tighter on the grandmother's moment of truth. We should talk about her moment of truth. Something changes in the grandmother. Notice what happened at the story’s climax:

“I wasn’t there so I can’t say He didn’t,” The Misfit said. “I wisht I had of been there,” he said, hitting the ground with his fist. “It ain’t right I wasn’t there because if I had of been there I would of known. Listen lady,” he said in a high voice, “if I had of been there I would of known and I wouldn’t be like I am now.” His voice seemed about to crack and the grandmother’s head cleared for an instant. She saw the man’s face twisted close to her own as if he were going to cry and she murmured, “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!” She reached out and touched him on the shoulder. The Misfit sprang back as if a snake had bitten him and shot her three times through the chest. Then he put his gun down on the ground and took off his glasses and began to clean them.


At the cracking of the Misfit’s voice and then seeing him almost cry, the grandmother has a transcendent vision. With each shot, she has called out “Bailey boy,” as if recalling her son as a child. This has been on her mind, but has had to focus on the tension-filled situation and the preservation of her life. When the Misfit pounds the ground with his fist—something I can see John Wesley doing—and nearly coming to a cry, the grandmother's social pretense of proper decorum falls away, her selfish sense of preservation falls away, and she has what O’Connor is always aiming for in her stories, a moment of grace. “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!” she says. All of a sudden she no longer sees a murderer but a child, a child perhaps who has gone wrong, but nonetheless a child of God and as a mother herself sees in him her own child. This is in complete opposition to everything we have seen of her. That litany of sins I enumerated above dissolve, fade into a memory. The willful striving to be socially respectable also dissolves, and the compassion of her heart is laid bare, honest and forthright.



This is why the Misfit at the end says, “She would of been a good woman, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

Samuel Johnson, the 18th century writer and intellectual has a famous quote: “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” The grandmother needed that moment of impending death to concentrate her mind and accept God’s grace. This was her moment of truth.

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Irene Comment:
"When the grandmother reaches out to the Misfit in recognition that he could be one of her babies, is she having her first moment in the story of moving away from her narcisistic inward obsession?

My Reply:
Irene, we posted nearly the same time. Yes, it is a moment of repressing her natural narcissism. I don't know if she's recognizing her sins. If somehow she would have survived and lived on, I could see her return to her previous way of life. But then it could be life altering. On that we'll never know. However, for the state of her soul at death, I would say this was enough of a repentance to be saved. With a heck of a lot of time in Purgatory!



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