(LifeSiteNews) — Mid-century Catholic novelist and short story writer Flannery O’Connor begins her story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” in the most ordinary, everyday manner imaginable, and the story ends with sudden catastrophe and ghastly violence. Contrary to appearances, however, the violence is not the point of the story – at least, not in itself.
When I used to teach this story to high school students, they often responded with confused curiosity. The preponderance of the shocking, incongruous, and grotesque in O’Connor’s writing left the students perturbed and pondering. They simply “didn’t get it.” But in spite of the unsettling and unconventional surface of the story, it contains depths of spiritual truth and character transformation, concentrated in a moment of grace at the climax of the story, almost as unexpected as the violence itself. O’Connor shows us that grace is at work in both of the twin extremes of modernity: the banal and the horrific.
“A Good Man is Hard to Find” tells the story of a family road trip gone wrong. There’s a father – “Bailey” – his wife, who goes unnamed, the children John Wesley and June Star, a cat named Pitty Sing, and the grandmother, all on their way to Florida (though the grandmother would prefer east Tennessee). This last figure is our protagonist.
In many ways, this is a stereotypical modern American family. In the opening scene of the story, we meet the silent Bailey with his nose stuck in the sports section of the newspaper, which is emblematic of his disengagement from his family and his failure to rein in his two bratty children, who, throughout the course of the story, demonstrate selfishness, disrespect, and boredom. Their noses are stuck in “comics” and “funny papers,” the perfect image of their insipid, irreverent attitude toward life and other human beings. Nothing for them is all that serious, and certainly nothing is sacred or above mockery. We have here a recognizable modern type.
When we first meet them, they are making fun of their grandmother, who has objected to the chosen destination for the trip: “John Wesley, a stocky child with glasses, said, ‘If you don’t want to go to Florida, why dontcha stay at home?’ … ‘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.’” The mother, “with a face as broad and innocent as a cabbage,” is as bland as her appearance would suggest, and is incapable of correcting the children.
At first, the grandmother appears to also fit neatly into a stereotype to match that of the annoying kids, lazy father, and ditzy mother: she is the prim and proper old Southern lady. The fussiness of her dress and her self-awareness of it shows this (and also foreshadows what is to come). “Her collars and cuffs were white organdy trimmed with lace and at her neckline she had pinned a purple spray of cloth violets containing a sachet. In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady.” The grandmother perceives herself as correct, well-bred, slightly superior for most of the story. And in a sense she is superior to her family, who have adopted the banality of the standard American lifestyle in contrast to the more traditional and substantial way of life that the grandmother still remembers from when she was young.
Moreover, she has not lost all sense of wonder at the world. She is more “alive” than her son or his family. “She pointed out interesting details of the scenery: Stone Mountain; the blue granite that in some places came up to both sides of the highway; the brilliant red clay banks slightly streaked with purple; and the various crops that made rows of green lace-work on the ground. The trees were full of silverwhite sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled.” Despite her frequent self-satisfied and didactic air, the grandmother is at least capable of seeing something outside herself. This will be important for her transformation later. Contrast the grandmother’s engagement with the scenery with the other passengers’ reaction, stated in the next line: “The children were reading comic magazines and their mother had gone back to sleep.”
O’Connor heightens the obliviousness and malice of the children in the humorous exchange that follows:
‘Let’s go through Georgia fast so we won’t have to look at it much,’ John Wesley said.
‘If I were a little boy,’ said the grandmother, ‘I wouldn’t talk about my native state that way. Tennessee has the mountains and Georgia has the hills.’
‘Tennessee is just a hillbilly dumping ground,’ John Wesley said, ‘and Georgia is a lousy state too.’
‘You said it,’ June Star said.
The grandmother, again, can recall a better time – she knows something of culture, real culture, and custom, wherein children are taught to reverence their heritage and express gratitude for the world they have received as a free gift: “‘In my time … children were more respectful of their native states and their parents and everything else. People did right then.’”
However, the grandmother has allowed her understanding of the Old South, of tradition and good manners, to turn to the poison of self-complacency and self-satisfaction. In addition, she is as selfish as the rest of the family. We see this first in the fact that she stows away her cat, Pitty Sing, in a basket in spite of the fact that her son doesn’t want to bring the cat with. It is worth noting in passing the name of the cat, “Pitty Sing,” remindful of the word “pity,” reflects the grandmother’s moment of grace, which will turn on an experience of compassion.
The grandmother also fabricates a tale about a plantation with a hidden treasure in order to get the family to stop at an estate she thinks she remembers from when she was young. Of course, the only thing that excites the materially-minded children throughout the journey is this mention of money, and they whine at their father until he relents and turns down the side road (which turns out to be the wrong one).
These two acts of selfishness and deception lead directly to the family’s undoing and the catastrophic ending of the story: the cat bursts out of the basket, startling Bailey, which causes the car to careen off the road and get wrecked in the ditch. Another car soon pulls up, but it turns out to be an escaped convict and serial killer, the Misfit, and two of his cronies. The family’s relief quickly turns to horror as they realize their predicament, recognizing the Misfit from newspaper reports. The grandmother exclaims, “You’re the Misfit!” and the latter responds, “‘Yes’m … but it would have been better for all of you, lady, if you hadn’t of reckernized me.’ ”
Then, one by one, the members of the family are led into the woods by the Misfit’s henchmen and shot, while the Misfit and the grandmother carry on a surprisingly philosophical conversation. O’Connor brilliantly juxtaposes the two opposite figures: the prim grandmother and the heartless hillbilly.
Except, as the conversation goes on, we begin to realize that neither character completely fits the stereotype constructed around them. They are, simply, two sinners. At first, the grandmother, terror-stricken, utters obvious and semi-incoherent flattery to try to save her own life. “‘I know you’re a good man. You don’t look a bit like you have common blood. I know you must come from nice people!’” But she hears the Misfit telling, in a confused way, of his varied life and his extreme puzzlement over his own fate, and something stirs inside her.
“‘I never was a bad boy that I remember of,’ The Misfit said in an almost dreamy voice, ‘but somewheres along the line I done something wrong and got sent to the penitentiary … I forget what I done, lady. I set there and set there, trying to remember what it was I done and I ain’t recalled it to this day.’”
Somewhat mindlessly, still in shock, still trying to save herself, the grandmother urges him to pray. The conversation moves naturally to religion. “‘Yes’m,’ The Misfit said … ‘Jesus shown everything off balance. It was the same case with Him as with me except He hadn’t committed any crime and they could prove I had committed one because they had the papers on me … If He did what He said, then it’s nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him, and if He didn’t, then it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can – by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him.’”
Here, the Misfit’s voice rises to almost that of a prophet, calling us to account, whipping against the modern world like a whirlwind. We realize that he has more humanity to him, in some sense, even than Bailey’s family, though he has done far greater evil. He recognizes what is at stake, the mystery of human life, the mystery of Christ, which cannot simply be ignored or laughed away. If the Incarnation is real, then it demands something of us – or rather, everything. If it is untrue, then one might as well sink to the lowest level of selfishness. He is logically consistent, at least.
He expresses, almost tearfully, the torturing doubt about it all. He doesn’t know whether Jesus raised the dead or not, whether He was who He said He was:
‘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.
And this is the crucial moment. O’Connor expresses, through the clearing of the grandmother’s head, that for a moment, with the help of grace, she really sees the Misfit – not as a monster or a threat, but simply as another human being. She recognizes their shared humanity, perhaps their shared selfishness and sinfulness. She forgets all about being a lady, being in a class apart. Most importantly, for the first time, she forgets herself and her own danger and simply reaches out to him, fingertips quivering with compassion. It took the violence of the crash and the attack to wake her from the slumber of mundanity and complacency and prepare the way for grace, which now sweeps into her soul.
For a moment, a reality of another order bursts through the seams of the story and the characters’ lives. For a fraction of a second, the world stands still: compelled to silence by the sudden intrusion of something beyond itself. The grandmother’s moment of grace has come, and she accepted it.
O’Connor doesn’t give us the comfort of the grandmother’s life being spared, or even a clear understanding of what has transpired in her soul. In fact, her little gesture of mercy so shocks the Misfit that he kills her. But something much more important than the life of the body has played out, however obscurely and uncertainly to our eyes.
O’Connor herself, in commenting on the story, said of this moment that it was a moment “both in character and beyond character; [suggesting] both the world and eternity … a gesture that transcended any neat allegory that might have been intended or any pat moral categories a reader could make … a gesture which somehow made contact with mystery.”
In that same commentary, O’Connor perhaps answers the objections of my students who, at first, couldn’t understand the point of this bizarre ending. “Our age not only does not have a very sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace, it no longer has much feeling for the nature of the violence which precede and follow them.”
Our vision is indeed hazy. But fortunately, we have stories like O’Connor’s to sharpen our eyes, a bit, for those “almost imperceptible intrusions.”