Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find

A Better Short Story is Hard to Find

Flannery O'Connor is perhaps the most iconoclastic writer in American literature. It's difficult to find anyone to compare her with; anyone who preceded her or succeeded her. I suppose Shirley Jackson has some thematic qualities that could be considered similar, but their stories share almost nothing in the way of plots or characters. Critics love nothing better than to box someone in with a pithy description and the one typically chosen for Flannery O'Connor is southern gothic. 

It's as good as any, I guess, but it's utter futility is best expressed by comparing O'Connor to another writer who has been tainted as writing within the southern gothic tradition, William Faulkner. O'Connor has about as much in common with Faulkner as she does with Hemingway, so there goes my last mention of the term southern gothic. If Flannery O'Connor is known for any one piece of writing, it would probably be A Good Man is Hard to Find. This classic short story has been anthologized almost as often as Shirley Jackson's The Lottery, and more often than not winds up on the reading list of at least one college class per semester at any institute of higher learning

SPOILER ALERT

A Good Man is Hard to Find kicks off with a simple story told in probably a hundred other tales: A nuclear family is headed to Florida. In this case O'Connor peoples the car with a husband and wife, two annoying children, a baby and, most importantly, the mother of the husband. It is this grandmother who is the central player in the drama and her influence over the events that will short be revealed is brilliantly foreshadowed by her initial act of rebellion: smuggling her cat into the car against her son's order. The grandmother's rebellious influence over events is not always so openly defiant; as the trip progress she wheedles her son into making a side trip so she can visit a plantation she recalls from her younger days.