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

A Better Short Story is Hard to Find

And this is the point where the whole them of this elegantly simple, yet often frustratingly ambiguous story kicks in. The grandmother looks up into the face of The Misfit, her own face beatific with Christian love. Her reaches out to lay upon the cheek of The Misfit as she calls him one of her own children. The Misfit instantly recoils from her touch, almost as if she is the serpent in Eden about to strike, and he sends three fatal bullets into her body. On the way back to their car one of the other men observes that the grandmother talked too much, to which The Misfit replies if only someone had always been holding a gun to her, she would have been a good woman.

Like so many other O'Connor's stories, A Good Man is Hard to Find has a downbeat ending; indeed, it is not just downbeat, but even ambiguous. Yes, the whole family is dead, and there's certainly little that is open-ended about that aspect, but remember that The Misift does get away with it. He literally gets away with mass murder. And yet there seems to something left to told; not something as simplistic as what eventually happens to The Misfit. We all know he'll die young and violently. But there is something thematically that still needs to be told. The final image we get of the grandmother is of her lying dead in a ditch, a smile on her face. There is so much going on in the final few paragraphs of this relatively short tale that it probably comes as no surprise that most serious academic critiques of this O'Conner masterpiece run at least twice as long as the story itself. A Good Man is Hard to Find is shockingly short considering its status in American literature; a straightforward linear narrative that is told in plain, easily accessible language, but that is nonethless as complex as any of the far more intricate short stories of Joyce or Faulkner.