Societal Pressures in O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find

A Home Without Society is Hard to Find

Flannery O'Connor shocks readers with her story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," the tale of a road trip that ends in death for a family on vacation. The work features many characters that represent the piece's main theme: social pressures to define one's image. O'Connor, through this story, displays that forced obligations endanger the sanity of individuals by placing them under too much pressure, and do not serve as a boon.

Throughout "A Good Man Is Hard to Find", O'Connor's characters assign each other roles and assume qualities of each other without ever listening to one another. In the beginning paragraphs, the children of the family, June Star and John Wesley, assign the grandmother the qualities of having a stubborn, strong will: "She wouldn't stay at home to be queen for a day." (406). By saying this, June Star displays that the grandmother is restrained to a set and expected behavior. Her words reflect the viewpoints of the entire family against the grandmother. The elderly woman must struggle against these if she is to get her way even as she seeks to find herself at a different destination for the vacation. These prejudices have been taught at an early age to these children; it is clear that they permeate the society that these characters dwell in.

Societal influences are a way the characters learn to communicate with the outside world that surpasses all bounds of speech and sign. The grandmother herself knows that, when dressed in pristine white, lace, and lilac print: "anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady." (407). While foreshadowing the image of her later in the tale, we see that she knows that her outward appearance is most important in the eyes of the world, though she does not realize the weight of this fact until much later.