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

Friday, June 26, 2020

Short Story Analysis: A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor, Part 1

Summary

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?


“A Good Man is Hard to Find” is on page 130.

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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.


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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

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Oh what a treat I just found. Flannery O'Connor reads the story here on YouTube. The audience laughs repeatedly.  



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