A
family of five and the grandmother from Georgia go on driving vacation toward
Florida when the grandmother connives her son, the driver, to take a detour to
a southern plantation she remembers. The
detour turns into a dirt road, and the grandmother’s cat jumps out of a bag to
disturb the driver, leading the car to flip onto the side of the road. Coming to their assistance is an escaped
convict, who calls himself “The Misfit,” and two of his henchmen, which leads
to a climatic dialogue between the Misfit and the grandmother.
We
have two weeks to read and discuss this story.
Let’s not give away the ending the first week. We can discuss the ending starting next
week. This will give everyone a chance
to read it without it being spoiled. In
the meantime, there are at least three ways to enjoy this story.
(1)
Enjoy all the witty and zany humor that runs throughout the story. Heck, there’s even a monkey in the
story. What’s a monkey doing in rural
Georgia anyway? I picked this story
because we wanted something a little more fun after all this pandemic
news. There’s even a reference to the
Spanish flu in the story!
(2)
Notice the sequence of events that string together that leads to the climatic
ending. Notice the situational irony in
the events and verbal irony in the dialogue.
(3)
Compare the characters of the Misfit and the Grandmother. What makes them different? What do they have in common?
Next
week when we open this up to discuss the ending, we can discuss the deeper
implications of the story. What is,
after all, a “good man?” What are the
theological implications of the story?
You
can find O’Connor’s The Complete Stories online,
here, https://d2y1pz2y630308.cloudfront.net/2741/documents/2017/1/The-Complete-Stories-Flannery-OConnor.pdf
“A
Good Man is Hard to Find” is on page 130.
###
Let’s
start with some aspects of the grandmother’s character. We see her chief trait in the very first
sentence of the story: “The grandmother
didn’t want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in
east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey’s mind.” And later in the first paragraph she tells
her son, “Here this fellow that calls himself The Misfit is aloose from the
Federal Pen and headed toward Florida and you read here what it says he did to
these people. Just you read it. I wouldn’t take my children in any direction
with a criminal like that aloose in it. I couldn’t answer to my conscience if I
did.” Grandma, as I will refer to her
since she is nameless, is manipulative, scheming, calculating, devious, and I
would even say, passive-aggressive. And
those aren’t even her only sins. When
she doesn’t get her way, John Wesley, the boy, tells her to stay at home. Grandma responds back in a childish exchange
with the two children.
“She wouldn’t stay at
home to be queen for a day,” June Star said without raising her yellow head.
“Yes and what would you
do if this fellow, The Misfit, caught you?” the grandmother asked.
“I’d smack his face,”
John Wesley said.
“She wouldn’t stay at
home for a million bucks,” June Star said. “Afraid she’d miss something. She
has to go everywhere we go.”
“All right, Miss,” the
grandmother said. “Just remember that the next time you want me to curl your
hair.”
She’s
vindictive, petty, and childish, reducing herself to their level of childish
bickering. Obviously this wasn’t the
first time. June Star turns out to be
right, Grandma is the very first person ready for the trip the next morning. The kids know her well. And still these aren’t her only sins. We see she is racist, uppity to those who may
not have as much money or privilege as she has, and down-right
condescending.
And
still these are not her only sins. She
idolizes a time of slavery, “the plantation,” and measures the worth of people
on whether they own mansions and hold stock.
When June Star tells Grandma that she wouldn’t have been interested in a
man that just brought over watermelons, Grandma responds, “she would have done
well to marry Mr. Teagarden because he was a gentleman and had bought Coca-Cola
stock when it first came out and that he had died only a few years ago, a very
wealthy man.”
And
she just lies. Now, I don’t blame her
for lying when faced with the Misfit holding a gun at her, but did she really
tell the truth to Red Sammy that he was a “good man?” Here she just got finished describing her
ideal man in Mr. Teagarden (a name that suspiciously sounds contrived and may
not have been a true story) when she tells a sort of slob of a guy, “the fat
boy with the happy laugh” according to his sign who the whole time is never
happy or laughs (actually he’s morose and sullen) that he is a “good man.” We don’t have enough information on whether
Sammy is a good man—he seems to be lying with his sign—and certainly Grandma
doesn’t have enough information. She
just met him. Maybe he is or maybe he
isn’t, but she seems to come to a conclusion on a simple anecdote.
Notice
what Sammy says after she tells him he’s a good man. ““Yes’m, I suppose so.” He agrees.
We all think we’re good people.
And the grandmother’s constant telling people they’re “good” is really a
projection of what she thinks of herself.
She considers herself “good,” despite the litany of sins we see on every
page. She thinks of herself as a
Southern Lady, who is not common, who is above the modern people, above the
blacks, and above the Europeans. What it
comes down to is that she is prideful, the most damning sin of all.
###
I
know some don’t believe me this is a funny story. Without getting to the ending, which seems to
throw the comedy off balance—just like the Misfit says, “Jesus thown everything
off balance,” the climax throws the story humor off balance—let me highlight
some of the funny comedic moments.
In
the hopes of getting her son to change his mind about where to go on vacation,
Grandma says, “Just you read it. I wouldn’t take my children in any direction
with a criminal like that aloose in it. I couldn’t answer to my conscience if I
did.” Well that’s exactly what she does
in having them turn around and go down that dirt road.
When
we first see Baily’s wife she is described as having a face “as broad and innocent
as a cabbage and was tied around with a green head-kerchief that had two points
on the top like a rabbit’s ears.” And
her personality is rather like a cabbage.
When
John Wesley is asked what he would do if he met up with the Misfit, he says,
“I’d smack his face.” Yeah, sure.
The
childish back and forth between the children and the grandmother is a sort of
low brow comedy, kind of like a TV skit.
Grandma
is dressed rather formal for a driving vacation trip, white gloves, a navy,
print dress accented with lace and a decorative pin at the neckline. And a rather pompous hat. Reminds me of characters in the TV show Hee Haw from the 1970s, which was full
of funny southern stereotypes.
Ironically she thinks, “In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead
on the highway would know at once that she was a lady.”
The
road stop diner they stop to eat is owned by Red Sammy Butts, a man who wears
his pants just above his butt, has a belly flopping over that looks like a
“sack of meal,” “the fat boy with the happy laugh” as he calls himself, but as
it turns out as I said he is just the opposite, morose and sullen.
Chained
in Red Sammy’s parking lot is a monkey who seems to be scared of the children,
chattering and climbing the tree. Why a
monkey in rural Georgia? I’m not exactly
sure, but it’s awfully strange and comedic.
It seems almost like a living gargoyle.
Of
course with the accident you have the cat jumping out of the bag, latching
itself to Baily as he’s driving, and causing the car to flip into a ditch. Then the children coming out shout for joy: ‘“We’ve had an ACCIDENT!” the children
screamed in a frenzy of delight’ and then find themselves sorry that no one was
killed. It’s slapstick.
There’s
lots of subtle humor. It really is meant
to be funny.
My
Replies to Funny Moments:
(1) Yes, Irene, the
Misfit's final assessment of the grandmother is very important and goes into
the theological dimensions of the story. We can discuss that next week.
To Kelly, yes that [Grandmother
getting the wrong dirt drive, the wrong state] was very funny. I almost put
that down in my list but I had to cut it off somewhere. I also thought it very
funny that the grandmother hoped she had damaged an organ in the accident in
the hopes it would delay Bailey's ire.
And another very funny
moment was Bailey's ire when Grandma tells the Misfit she recognizes him.
O'Connor doesn't actually use the cuss words, but we are left to imagine some
pretty intense four letter words coming out of Bailey's mouth.
(2) Haha!. Very good
Ashleigh. Yes, she's tricky, or at least she tries to be. Everything , however,
turns into a disaster!
(3) The other time we get
an insight into Bailey is when he screams at his mother. There's not much
O'Connor gives us. But given how unruly the children are, I don't know if we
can consider them good parents. What's interesting is that the Misfit seems to
have better control over the children than the parents. O'Connor does
characterize the mother as looking as innocent as a "cabbage." Is
that a compliment or a swipe? I don't take that as a compliment, especially
since she has a head-kerchief on that is described as "rabbit ears."
She seems silly too. O'Connor points out twice that she is wearing slacks,
which I take for 1950's South is outside the norm and suggestive of something.
I just don't know what it suggests.
(4) Bailey is not so
silent, but they are poor parents as far as I can tell. The children are
absorbing and obtaining the grandmother's personal defects. The children are a
bunch of misfits. ;)
(5) There just isn’t
enough material there to fully to understand Bailey and his wife. They are
minor characters who help move the plot. They are two dimensional. Even the two
children are more fully fleshed out than their parents. Really there are two
characters one needs to understand to fully get the story, Grandma and the
Misfit. They are book ends
###
Oh
what a treat I just found. Flannery O'Connor reads the story here on YouTube.
The audience laughs repeatedly.
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