Here is the link to the story. Read it silently and look over the background and questions for discussion
for today and tomorrow.
pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~surette/goodman.html
About Flannery O'Connor:
topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/o/flannery_oconnor/index.html
Background to the story:
http://college.cengage.com/english/heath/syllabuild/iguide/oconnor.html
Beverly Lyon Clark
Excerpt:
In general, the elusiveness of O'Connor's best stories makes them eminently teachable--pushing students to sustain ambiguity, to withhold final judgments. It also pushes me to teach better--to empower students more effectively, since I don't have all the answers at my fingertips. My responses to O'Connor are always tentative, exploratory. I start, as do most of my students, with a gut response that is negative. For O'Connor defies my humanistic values--she distances the characters and thwarts compassion. Above all, O'Connor's work raises tantalizing questions. Is she, as John Hawkes suggests, "happily on the side of the devil"? Or, on the contrary, does the diabolical Misfit function, paradoxically, as an agent of grace? We know what O'Connor wants us to believe. But should we?
Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, and Personal Issues
One important context that I need to provide for my students is background on O'Connor's Christianity. The most useful source here is O'Connor's own essays and lectures, which often explain how to read her works as she would have them read. Certainly O'Connor's pronouncements have guided much of the criticism of her work. I'll summarize some of her main points:She states that the subject of her work is "the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil" (Mystery and Manners 118). She tries to portray in each story "an action that is totally unexpected, yet totally believable" (118), often an act of violence, violence being "the extreme situation that best reveals what we are essentially" (113). Through violence she wants to evoke Christian mystery, though she doesn't exclude other approaches to her fiction: she states that she could not have written "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" in any other way but "there are perhaps other ways than my own in which this story could be read" (109).
In general O'Connor explains that she is not so much a realist of the social fabric as a "realist of distances" (44), portraying both concrete everyday manners and something more, something beyond the ordinary: "It is the business of fiction to embody mystery through manners . . ." (124). She admits too that her fiction might be called grotesque, though she cautions that "anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic" (40). And she connects her religious concerns with being southern, for, she says, "while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted" (44).
I also find it important to address the question of racism in the story. Is the story racist? I ask. Is the grandmother racist, in her comments on cute little pickaninnies and her use of "nigger"? Does the narrator endorse the grandmother's attitude? And what do we make of her naming a cat Pitty Sing--a pseudo-Japanese name that sounds less like Japanese than like a babytalk version of "pretty thing"? Is O'Connor simply presenting characteristically racist attitudes of not particularly admirable characters? I find Alice Walker's comments helpful here, on O'Connor's respectful reluctance to enter the minds of black characters and pretend to know what they're thinking.
Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections
O'Connor is usually compared to writers who are southern or gothic or Catholic or some combination thereof: e.g., William Faulkner, Nathanael West, Graham Greene. Louise Westling (in Sacred Groves and Ravaged Gardens: The Fiction of Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O'Connor [University of Georgia Press, 1985]) has made fruitful comparisons with Eudora Welty and Carson McCullers, though most critics seem to find it difficult to discover points of comparison with other women writers.Questions for Reading and Discussion/Approaches to Writing
The following questions can be given to students in advance or used to guide discussion during class:1. What qualities of the grandmother do you like? What qualities do you dislike? How did you feel when The Misfit killed her? Why?
2. How would you characterize the other members of the family? What is the function of images like the following: the mother's "face was 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 the grandmother's "big black valise looked like the head of a hippopotamus"?
3. How does O'Connor foreshadow the encounter with The Misfit?
4. What does the grandmother mean by a "good man"? Whom does she consider good people? What are other possible meanings of "good"? Why does she tell The Misfit that he's a good man? Is there any sense in which he is?
5. What is the significance of the discussion of Jesus? Was he a good man?
6. What is the significance of the grandmother's saying, "Why you're one of my babies. You're one of my own children"?
7. What is the significance of The Misfit's saying, "She would of been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life"?
There are, of course, no absolute answers to these questions; the story resists easy solutions, violates the reader's expectations.
From shmoop.com:
A Good Man is Hard to Find
In A Nutshell
Some readers think "A Good Man is Hard to Find" is a cynical tale, uncompromising in the way it brings out human pettiness and manipulation. Others think it's a black comedy worthy of a Coen brothers short film, or a twisted cartoon. Or perhaps it's a horror story. Still others think it's an uplifting depiction of the mysterious ways God works through human beings over and above their own wills. Maybe it's even all of these at once?
Since it was first published, "A Good Man is Hard to Find" has been Flannery O'Connor's best-known story. Though she'd written it in1953, the story was published in 1955 as part of a collection with the same name, A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories. Her second published work, the collection established Flannery O'Connor as a major voice in American literature, and particularly Southern literature, until her early death (at the age of 39) in 1964. It also brought her fame as a modern master of the short story (her novels were critically less successful).
Even during O'Connor's lifetime, her works provoked very different reactions in her readers. Many readers and critics found them consistently "grotesque" in their depiction of debased, repulsive (and usually unsympathetic) characters and their at times spectacular displays of violence or cruelty. Some appreciated them as comedies for this reason, while others reacted with disgust. "A Good Man is Hard to Find," as O'Connor's most popular story, frequently stood at the center of discussion. It was also, for that reason, the story about which the author herself spoke most often (she also gave several public readings of it).
O'Connor saw all of her fiction, certainly including this story, as realistic, demandingly unsentimental, but ultimately hopeful. Her inspiration as a writer came from a deeply felt faith in Roman Catholicism, which she claimed informed all of her stories. She wrote, "The stories are hard but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism" (source: The Habit of Being, p. 90). A recurrent theme throughout her writings was the action of divine grace in the horribly imperfect, often revolting, generally funny world of human beings, a theme very much present in "A Good Man is Hard to Find." This story affords perhaps the best place to start in exploring the work of this rather eccentric, certainly unique literary voice.
Since it was first published, "A Good Man is Hard to Find" has been Flannery O'Connor's best-known story. Though she'd written it in1953, the story was published in 1955 as part of a collection with the same name, A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories. Her second published work, the collection established Flannery O'Connor as a major voice in American literature, and particularly Southern literature, until her early death (at the age of 39) in 1964. It also brought her fame as a modern master of the short story (her novels were critically less successful).
Even during O'Connor's lifetime, her works provoked very different reactions in her readers. Many readers and critics found them consistently "grotesque" in their depiction of debased, repulsive (and usually unsympathetic) characters and their at times spectacular displays of violence or cruelty. Some appreciated them as comedies for this reason, while others reacted with disgust. "A Good Man is Hard to Find," as O'Connor's most popular story, frequently stood at the center of discussion. It was also, for that reason, the story about which the author herself spoke most often (she also gave several public readings of it).
O'Connor saw all of her fiction, certainly including this story, as realistic, demandingly unsentimental, but ultimately hopeful. Her inspiration as a writer came from a deeply felt faith in Roman Catholicism, which she claimed informed all of her stories. She wrote, "The stories are hard but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism" (source: The Habit of Being, p. 90). A recurrent theme throughout her writings was the action of divine grace in the horribly imperfect, often revolting, generally funny world of human beings, a theme very much present in "A Good Man is Hard to Find." This story affords perhaps the best place to start in exploring the work of this rather eccentric, certainly unique literary voice.
Why Should I Care?
Is a good man (or woman) hard to find? So maybe you don't think about the question all that much per se. But it does suggest another question you might have thought about, since it's one of the Big Questions: what makes a good person? In the confrontation of thoroughly average old grandmother with a criminal who appears certifiably "evil" by just about anyone's standards, Flannery O'Connor's surprisingly deep little story opens up that question, and a whole bunch of others:
Then of course there are other less philosophical – but still good – reasons to read the story. It's just a great read, with a strange but effective mix of foreboding, page-turning suspense and laugh-out-loud humor. It's about one of those iconic experiences in all of our lives: the family vacation from hell! Rotten little sisters, irritatingly insistent grandmothers, car accidents, coincidental (or is it fate?) run-ins with serial killers…think of it as Coen brothers meets National Lampoon. Add to that all of those deep thoughts on the nature of good and evil, and you've got a short but intense story well worth the read.
- Is being "good" a matter of being respectable or decent? Having a good upbringing, or good blood? Being religious? Kind and honest? Or is it something more demanding, perhaps even impossible?
- How does genuine goodness square with the way human beings actually are – with their pettiness, their selfishness, their annoying little quirks and vanities?
- What does it mean not to be good, and what does it mean to be evil?
- And – a particularly important question in the story – do we need religion to answer any, or all, of these questions?
Then of course there are other less philosophical – but still good – reasons to read the story. It's just a great read, with a strange but effective mix of foreboding, page-turning suspense and laugh-out-loud humor. It's about one of those iconic experiences in all of our lives: the family vacation from hell! Rotten little sisters, irritatingly insistent grandmothers, car accidents, coincidental (or is it fate?) run-ins with serial killers…think of it as Coen brothers meets National Lampoon. Add to that all of those deep thoughts on the nature of good and evil, and you've got a short but intense story well worth the read.
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