Ms. Marcum's English NxTGen Studio - AP Literature 2014-2015



Flannery O'Connor and " A Good Man Is Hard To Find"

[pic]"A Good Man Is Hard To Find" is a deceptively easily read story which makes us laugh and laugh, for O'Connor captures a certain essence of southern life as few people have. But in the midst of the laughter, if we read carefully, we also realize that the story invites debate about the meaning of "a good man," about the meaning of the events with which it concludes, and about the meaning of our existence in the universe. Notice the repetition of the word, "meaning."

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Modernism and Meaning in O'Connor

O'Connor's work provides an excellent transition from the modernistic period to the multiple perspectives of postmodernism. Like Faulkner, she trained her eye on a small area of the real world and so heightened it by her imagination as to transform it forever. Typically, modernists can create or capture a deep pattern of meaning from a plethora of realistic details.

1. What is meant by using details to "make" meaning?

As the story begins, note the extremely realistic detail which sets us in a definite time and place::

• we know what the speedometer reads,

• we know at what time the family drives out of Atlanta,

• specific geographical references are plentiful,

• popular culture references are also plentiful: the "children's mother" plays the perennially popular "Tennessee Waltz" on the jukebox, and on and on.

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Examples of Various Meanings from Details

2. The entire story is tied together by a journey. Is that of special significance?

This story is a travel narrative, but neither east Tennessee nor Florida is the destination toward which this family rides. There are foreshadowing and symbolic suggestions of other levels of meaning than the literal ones from early on in the story.

• See the references to the possibility of the grandmother's cat dying if she leaves it at home, dressing up for a drive lest she die in a highway accident, noticing the five or six graves in a field.

• Then, the family stops at the infernal RED SAMMY'S, near Toombsboro(Wow! A perfect Halloween town!), where horrors, both real and suggested, abound: the "burnt brown" owner's wife, the flea-catching monkey, and the animal guard all are reminders of a Dante-Inferno landscape. Finally, of course, the family dies when they meet a group who emerges from "a big black battered hearse-like automobile"(p. 1889).

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3. So, if Toomsboro is a suggestive name, are there other names that have suggested levels of meaning?

O'Connors appropriation of external realities to suggest other levels of meaning extend to the names in the story: Toomsboro is a town in central Georgia; John Wesley, founder of Methodism (1703-1791), is in this story a bespectacled child with a lively, argumentative mind; June Star is possibly a tribute to all the Junes who got last billing in second-feature films of the 1930s and '40s; Bailey seems to confer upon the father a kind of Southern Everyman status. Then there are characters with, significantly, no name: the grandmother's domination on the family is larger than her individuality; the children's mother seems more vegetable than human with her "broad and innocent" face like a "cabbage and was tied around with a green handkerchief that had two points on the top like rabbit's ears.

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4. The grandmother throws the name of Jesus around a lot and there are other references to religion. What does all that add up to?

O'Connor presents the reader with a theology lesson: at the beginning of the story the grandmother is totally preoccupied with what she "wants." Other events show us go on to show us these shallow travelers, people who are the embodiments of the self-interested, materialistic society that arose in the wake of World War II. O'Connor seems to be teaching that in the midst of life we are in death (none of us, to speak of, know it.). But toward the end of the story, the grandmother's moment of death so clarifies the meaning of life that the grandmother forgets what she "wants" and reaches out to include "The Misfit" as one of her children.

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5. The Misfit is such an important and strange character, he's bound to "mean something. What is it? "The Misfit" suggests many levels of interpretation, some of them suggesting a parallel with John Wesley, the child, some of them suggesting spiritual levels of meaning, and others stemming from The Misfit's need for literal proof.

First,The grandmother makes a gesture of inclusion toward The Misfit, calling him her son which compels him to shoot an old woman. Why does this inclusion into a family upset him so much?

• At the beginning of the story, we learn about the grandmother that "Bailey was the son she lived with,"suggesting the possibility of another son. Later she stand over her son's balding head with "one hand on her thin hip and the other rattling the newspaper" (p. 1884) and warns him about The Misfit. At the end of the story, these postural details recur. "The Misfit squatted down on the ground" (p. 1981), after the grandmother has made her fatal pronouncement of his identity. Two paragraphs later we read that Bailey was "squatting in the position of a runner about to spring forward" before he was taken off into the woods and shot, as the grandmother addresses her son but looks down at "The Misfit squatting on the ground in front of her." Within minutes The Misfit is wearing her son's "yellow shirt with bright blue parrots in it."

• When The Misfit, wearing "silver-rimmed spectacles that gave him a scholarly look" and carrying a gun, emerges from his hearse-like car, he tells about making his own father nervous: "You know," Daddy said, "it's some that can live their whole life without asking about it and it's others has to know why it is, and this boy is one of the latters. He's going to be into everything." And the father didn't like it. The boy wasn't supposed to bother people by being curious or asking questions.

The prison psychoanalyst had tried to explain the Oedipus complex to The Misfit, who took him literally and rejected the diagnosis. Remember the story of the son who killed his own father? But the hostility that he does not acknowledge feeling toward his own parents is enacted here as he destroys a family, horrified at the grandmother's claim that he is one of her children.

Secondly, why is he called a misfit?

O'Connor shows that The Misfit's tendency to take things literally is the theological heart of the problem. Growing up in the Bible Belt, where children are named after John Wesley and the Bible is taken literally, The Misfit cut his ties to his family by asking too many questions.

Now, he is defined by his adversarial stance toward the world and its wisdom. Like the child, John Wesley, who is desperate to open the secret panel in the fireplace of the grandmother's mythical white mansion ("not telling the truth but wishing that she were," as we are told on p. 1887), The Misfit want to make experience intelligible. He wants to actually see, hear, taste, touch; he needs literal proof of things and ideas.

The grandmother keeps throwing the name of Jesus at The Misfit, not understanding that his profound alienation stems from his inability to subscribe to the shallow beliefs to which the grandmother has paid lip service all her life. His need for verification traps him in an inadequate "rational" view of the world. He does not know about what O'Connor speaks of as "the mystery of faith that allows one to know the truth that has never been seen." He is one of what is called O'Connor's "flawed prophets."

He has a depth of experience as shown in his listing of occupations--gospel singing, undertaking, plowing "Mother Earth," being in a tornado, seeing a man burnt and a woman flogged--that goes far beyond the banal experience of his victims. Sensitive and psychotic, he has the spiritual insight to recognize that true belief throws "everything off balance" (p. 1894), just as we, the readers, are thrown off balance by what we see happen. First, we see this family drive out of a settled human environment which brings them face to face with the beauty and strangeness of God's created world, where the meanest of the trees sparkle (p. 1885). Yet in this Edenic natural environment, a gesture of inclusion registers like the touch of a snake and compels The Misfit to shoot an old woman. O'Connor lets the children reiterate their own delight in having had an ACCIDENT precisely because, one suspects, she would have us understand that there are no accidents in God's plan. [pic]

6. Is the murder of the grandmother and her family a prelude to The Misfit's eventual salvation, as O'Connor may hint, or is the story a vision of a world without redemptive possibilities?

Perhaps O'Connor would agree that the "silver stallion embossed on the front of" the red sweatshirt worn by one of The Misfit's henchmen (p. 1889) is a mass-marketed replica of the pale horse on which Death sits in the book of Revelation (6.8), the Christian's ultimate source of mystical symbols open to multiple and mutually contradictory interpretations. O'Connor's story, like the Bible itself, like all religious experience, defies pat analysis and for today's readers (consciously post-modern or not) remains open to interpretation. Great art, like the post-modernist's reality, "is not easily organized into coherent systems" (p. 1899). and neither are the "varieties of religious experience" that the philosopher William James described.

O'Connor's storytelling makes us savor asking questions like the #6 above, whether or not we can--or want to--find definitive answers to them.

@Eng.Edu

Discussion Questions for "A Good Man is Hard to Find"

Misfit, One who is unable to adjust to one's environment or circumstances or is considered to be disturbingly different from others.

Explain why the Misfit was suddenly so afraid of the grandmother that he had to shoot her?

1. The grandmother thinks of herself as a lady, and a good Christian woman. Is she?

2. How does the grandmother get the family into trouble?

3. Is there any foreshadowing of the ending? That is, are there any hints earlier in the story about what might happen to them at the end?

4. Is the Misfit polite? Is he evil? Why does he do the things he does?

5. There are many ways to interpret this story; how do you interpret its meaning?

6. How is the line in paragraph 140, page 278, ironic?

7. Note: Pay close attention to the last paragraph of the introduction to this story, on page 266; how would those ideas apply to the Misfit and the grandmother?

8. What are the grandmother's main characteristics? What do you think the author is pointing out in her characterization? Why do we see much of the action through her eyes?

9. What might the grandmother represent?

10. What is the tone of this story? How does the dialogue contribute to the overall tone?

11. What sort of symbolism is used? Is it possible to determine exactly what the author intends?

12. What values and attitudes does the Misfit have? How does he justify his actions?

13. What is the purpose of the reference to Jesus? What part does religion play in the story's main theme? What is the Misfit's attitude toward religion? The grandmother's?

14. What is the role of the Misfit's companions?

15. What conflicting values or concepts become apparent in the contrast between the Misfit and the grandmother?

16. What aspects of the story are ironic?

17. What is the significance of the Misfit's last statement, "It's no pleasure in life"? How does this relate to the theme?

Leading a discussion on the "binary," or convergence, of O'Connor's humor v. "the grotesque, ask students the following questions:

• How would you define the words "gothic" and "grotesque"?

• What does O'Connor mean by "grotesque"?

• What elements of "A Good Man is Hard to Find" would you describe as "grotesque"?

• What elements of "A Good Man is Hard to Find" would you describe as humorous?

• What are the effects of O'Connor's being both humorous and grotesque in "A Good Man is Hard to Find"?

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