The main conflict in "A Good Man is Hard to Find" involves understanding the meaning of life. This is not apparent until near the end of the story. All along, the family--and the grandmother--put their trust in the material world. They don't appear to think at all about the spiritual plane, but to enjoy the good things of the earth, such as the chance to take a car trip and eat a meal at Big Sam's. The grandmother puts her faith in her status as a lady and in her money. She is particularly careful to present herself as a lady, including wearing a hat.
But in the end, nothing in the material world can save the family or the grandmother. She is the last one left after the Misfit and his gang come across the family on a deserted road. They take the rest of the family into the woods and shoot them. The grandmother tries to bargain for her life with her money and her status as a lady. None of that matters to the Misfit. He does, however, engage her in a conversation about Jesus. He tells the grandmother that if he could somehow know what Jesus said was true, he would live in a different way. In the meantime, he has decided life is meaningless. The meaning of life is important to him, and her death comes about from the fact he finds it meaningless.
The grandmother has a moment of grace or spiritual truth in which she sees the Misfit as her own son--she perceives him through God's eyes. She expresses this truth to him just before he kills her, touching him emotionally for an instant.
The story argues that in extreme moments, such as the grandmother faced, God's grace can break into our lives--and that is what is important. There is a spiritual plane that can touch ordinary, irritating people like the Grandmother and even hardened killers like the Misfit.
In Flannery O'Connor's short story "A Good Man is Hard to Find," several different conflicts, both internal and external, are observable.
At the start of the story, internal conflict is already in effect: the grandmother does not want to go to Florida, but her son Bailey and his children insist. Her tone and her words both communicate her dissatisfaction with this plan, but she goes along with it anyway.
Relatively mild external conflict is apparent between the grandmother and her son's family as they travel in the car towards Florida. Disagreements with the children, who are ill-mannered, and bickering appear to characterize the grandmother's relationship with most everyone she encounters. The minor conflicts are irritating but not significant, which makes the eventual conflict between the Misfit and the family that much more distressing.
Toward the end of the story, the Misfit appears and the conflict between the individual characters in the story intensifies. Suddenly, the minor conflicts and family squabbles fade away in importance as the family members lose their lives to the Misfit, for no fault of their own.
I would say that the conflict in this story is character versus society. The grandmother possesses extremely outdated ideas about what society ought to be like, and she tends to embrace an older, more traditional—that is, more racist, classist—view of the world. She talks about the good old days, when people used to behave better than they do now and when the world was a better place, but she fails to recognize that the world wasn't better for everyone, just for a privileged few, like her. Her beliefs tend to lead her into conflict with her son, Bailey; his nameless wife; their horrible children, John Wesley and June Star; and, eventually and fatefully, with the Misfit. She thinks that she knows best, though her stubborn desire to bring her cat, against her son's wishes, leads to the family's car accident and her tactless and thoughtless identification of the Misfit leads to the death of her entire family.
No comments:
Post a Comment