EXPERIENCING FLANNERY O'CONNOR'S "A Good Man Is Hard To Find"

Author(s): Douglas Novich Leonard

Source: Interpretations, Vol. 14, No. 2 (SPRING 1983), pp. 48-54
Published by: Scriptorium Press
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 EXPERIENCING
FLANNERY O'CONNOR'S
"A Good Man Is Hard To Find"

With an almost defiant attitude, Flannery O'Connor expected to lose

most of her readers. It was in fact her desire to assault the consciousness of
the complacent and worldly wise that induced her to place grotesque
characters in violent circumstances. For her the grotesque character was
not an escape from realism, but rather an attempt to achieve a kind of

spiritual super-realism, since both her experience and orthodoxy taught

her that all humans are morally grotesque. Likewise, though violence is not
an everyday occurrence, it enables a proper perspective, bringing the
individual a sense of ultimate priorty. O'Connor employed grotesqueness
and violence in her stories to illustrate the workings of grace on her

characters, but more profoundly she was attempting to simulate the

workings of grace in the sensibility of the reader, that rare reader who
would go deeper. "The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning, but
experienced meaning," O'Connor states.1
An excellent example of the dynamics between O'Connor's art and the
reader is "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." Apparently, O'Connor thought
so as well, since she spent more time explaining this story than any other. It
was as if she were indulging herself in elucidating a single story as a model
for the interpretation of others. Exasperated by those who misunderstood
the story, she wrote numerous letters to readers and critics to set them

straight. "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" is also the story she most often
chose to read
to college audiences, and when she did so she would

specifically point out the "moment of grace" in the story and comment
about her own intention. Even though O'Connor had been schooled in the
New Criticism and believed that a work of literature should stand on its
own regardless and even in spite of its author, being misunderstood so

frequently and so outrageously goaded her into speaking about her

purposes in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," while she still insisted that the
meaning was independently embodied in the story itself.
A good point at which to begin would be the passage near the end that
deals with the story's "moment of grace" and thus with the meaning that
O'Connor intended the reader to experience:
... 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.2

The grandmother's gesture, said O'Connor, is an action "unlike any

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 DOUGLAS NOVICH LEONARD 49

other in the story;" it must be interpreted "on the anagogical level, that is,
the level that has to do with the Divine life and our participation in it."3
Unless it is taken to be cruel irony, the image of the grandmother lying
dead "with her legs crossed under her like a child's and her face smiling up
at the cloudless sky" (p. 132) signals the successful action of grace. It is not
the dead body here but the deathless soul entering into a state of
blessedness that O'Connor wishes us to see. That even the Misfit sees it is
apparent when he says: "She would have been a good woman ... if it had
been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life" (p. 133).
So it is the danger and violence of the situation that enables the
redemption of this self-serving and tedious elderly lady. She is shocked out
of her unthinking acceptance of the tepid Christianity that had passed to
her along with all the other superficial trappings of her would-be Southern
gentility. The murder of the "silly old woman," as O'Connor called her, is
simply the best thing that ever happened to her.4 O'Connor explained: "I
have found that violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to

reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace. Their heads
are so hard that almost nothing else will work."5 Presumably, in her
moment of crisis the grandmother senses her need for salvation. She does
not want to die forever. She also realizes the flimsiness of her old form of
Christianity: her religion has consisted of nothing more than platitudes
which she manipulated to suit her own purposes and with which she
buttressed her personal illusion of righteousness. In her present extremity
she sees her moral kinship with the Misfit, leading to her identification
with him. The repentance in that act of identification is implicit. But the
Misfit wants neither her pity nor her love; he guns her down to avoid them.
The grandmother goes to heaven.
But this is not the end of the meaning of the "moment of grace" in the

story. O'Connor insisted that "the meaning of a story should go on

expanding for the reader the more he thinks about it. . . ,"6 For all her

cynicism about readers in general, O'Connor made prodigious demands

on the intellectual, emotional, and even spiritual capacities of the reader
she had in mind. Obviously she could not pretend to offer the experience of
grace to her reader, but she did attempt to offer the next closest thing—the
reflection of a world in which grace is possible. Writing in a gospel-jaded,
but post-Christian era, O'Connor had set for herself a difficult course
indeed. Clara Claiborne Park argues that the grandmother, like the rest of
O'Connor's characters, fails to evoke the reader's compassion, largely
because she does not engage the compassion of her creator:

At the close of 'A Good Man is Hard to Find,' the Misfit

remarks of the murdered grandmother that 'she would have
been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her
every minute of her life.' The Misfit took on the job for the

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 50 "A Good Man Is Hard to Find"

grandmother, but it is the author who takes care of the reader.

Any time we begin to feel sympathy, she shoots us.7

Thus, in Park's view, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," along with
O'Connor's other stories, fails to reveal the "moment of grace" O'Connor
meant it to reveal. "The repetitive mayhem of her fiction," Park concludes,
"does not invite belief but parody."8 O'Connor would have been neither

surprised nor dismayed by this reaction to her work. In fact, she carefully
made allowance for such response in the stories themselves, licensing the
reader who is so inclined to see only the grotesque and the sublunary, and
to miss the revelation of grace. The question remains: Does "A Good Man
Is Hard to Find" have the power to go on expanding in the reader's
consciousness?

Many have seen the Misfit as the very personification of evil. His chosen
name is obviously O'Connor's jab at certain liberal notions of antisocial
behavior: the Misfit is not an otherwise good man who has been driven to
crime by a political or existential alienation from his culture. Nor is he the
product of a traumatic childhood. He is knowingly and willfully bad, as he
himself contends: "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" (p. 132). He is so bad that his
reaction to the grandmother's love is violence. In O'Connor's terms: "This
moment of grace excites the devil to frenzy."9
Yet at the same time O'Connor did not want us to dismiss the demonic
Misfit as a reprobate. Unlike the grandmother, the Misfit is earnestly
aware of metaphysical issues, sees the moral implications of Jesus Christ,
and is tortured by the "problem of good"—the idea that there may indeed
be something other than "meanness,"and that the redemptive love of God

may actually have been revealed through Jesus. For all his persistent and
willful rejection, the Misfit is not necessarily damned. O'Connor defended
him:

I don't want to equate the Misfit with the devil. I prefer to think
that, however unlikely this may seem, the old lady's gesture,
like the mustard seed, will grow to be a great crow-filled tree in
the Misfit's heart, and will be enough of a pain to him there to
turn him into the prophet he was meant to become. But that's
another story.10

Clearly, if this is her feeling toward her meanest villain, O'Connor is

wrongly accused of having no compassion for her characters.
The "moment of grace" in the story, then, is not limited to the
grandmother. Her grace is also the Misfit's simply because grace is never
individual. Its nature is to be like Jesus, outward-looking, self-sacrificing,
and loving even toward enemies and murderers. According to Catholic

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 DOUGLAS NOVICH LEONARD 51

teaching, when an individual is touched by grace, he or she becomes like

Christ—or, more accurately, if also more mystically—the person actually
becomes Christ through the working of the Holy Spirit. So, although in
her discussions of the story O'Connor referred to the "moment of grace" as
sometimes the grandmother's and at other times the Misfit's, the seeming
contradiction need not confuse. The action is entirely reciprocal. In a letter
to John Hawkes, O'Connor states the paradox precisely: "The Misfit is
touched by the Grace that comes through him in his particular suffering."11
Obviously, at least for the time being, the Misfit has rejected the grace the
grandmother offers in her role as Jesus. His rejection is bitterly ironic
because he has just complained with anger toward God that he was not
"
alive to see Jesus when he was on earth. 'I wisht I had of been there,' he

said, hitting the ground with his fist. ... 'If I had of been there I would of
known and I wouldn't be like I am now'" (p. 132). Grace has deprived him
of even that excuse. Nevertheless, the seed of his salvation may have been
sown—"but that's another story."
W. S. Marks III has criticized O'Connor for depriving her characters of
free will in their confrontation with grace. "Miss O'Connor's . . .
anxiousness to demonstrate the irresistibility of this grace reduces her
characters to hollow recipients of divine impulse," Marks argues. "Like
rudely carved figures in some cosmic marionette show, they twitch on their
wires as the indifferent spirit moves them—either to bizarre acts of
criminal integrity or to equally incredible decisions for Christ."12 Although
O'Connor often illustrates the power and violence of grace, it is clear that
she does not consider grace to be irresistible in the Calvinist sense. The
grandmother in "A Good Man is Hard to Find" seems entirely free. Only a
moment before she receives the grace that enables her to reach out in love
to the Misfit, she speaks the name of Christ as a curse and acknowledges
her doubts about the divinity of Christ:
"Jesus!" the old lady cried. "I know you wouldn't shoot a

lady! . . . Jesus you ought not to shoot a lady. . . ."

"Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead," the Misfit
continued, "and He shouldn't have done it. ..."
"Maybe he didn't raise the dead," the old lady mumbled. . . .
(pp. 131-32)
After a lifetime of easy faith that does not deserve to be called faith, she has
a terrible moment of doubt. Though leaning toward disbelief, the
grandmother still has not chosen. In her case doubt is refreshing honesty,
and honesty clears the way for grace, and for real faith. Her act has been
perfectly free and unpredictable. In a comment on the novelist and free
will, O'Connor said:
Even if he writes about characters who are mostly unfree, it is

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 52 "A Good Man Is Hard to Find"

the sudden action, the open possibility which he knows is the

only thing capable of illuminating the picture and giving it life.
So that while predictable predetermined actions have a comic
interest for me, it is the free act, the acceptance of grace
particularly, that I always have my eye on as the thing which
will make the story work. In the story "A Good Man is Hard to
Find," it is the grandmother's recognition that the Misfit is one
of her children.13

Like the grandmother, the Misfit is also free to accept or reject the grace
offered him through the grandmother, as he will continue to be free to

accept or reject the grace offered him again and again by a long-suffering
and merciful God.
If it surprises the reader that the otherwise unremarkable old

grandmother is the vessel of grace to the Misfit, that is as it should be.

O'Connor addressed this issue point-blank: "In the Protestant view I think
Grace and nature don't have much to do with each other. The old lady,
because of her hypocrisy and humanness and banality, couldn't be a
medium for Grace. In the sense that I see things the other way, I'm a
Catholic writer."14 "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" goes even further in

demonstrating this principle, in that even the Christ-hating Misfit serves as

a medium for grace. O'Connor acknowledged that in her stories, as she

supposed in life, "the devil accomplishes a good deal of groundwork that

seems to be necessary before grace is effective."15

Important to experiencing the meaning of the story is that the reader

must avoid making the grandmother into either a saint or a witch and the
Misfit into either a devil or a
prophet (as some have done). These
characters, for all their grotesqueness, are meant to be real—and, as real,
inscrutable at the deepest level of their spirituality. The Misfit, though
devilish, is earnest as a scholar in his search for truth, polite, and genuinely
sorry that he is a bad man.16 "It's no real pleasure in life," he tells his

ghoulish henchman after he shoots the grandmother (p. 133). Similarly,

the grandmother, though banal, hypocritical, and manipulative, is much
more likeable than her insensitive and stubborn son Bailey, his cabbage
faced wife, or their whining children. At least she shows a sense of humor, a
certain dignity, an interest in the world around her.
Even more important to experiencing the meaning of "A Good Man is
Hard to Find" is for the reader to sense the ambiguity of the action.
O'Connor has carefully written the story so that its events can be construed
as entirely natural—if that is how we wish to see them. Instead of
undergoing a supernatural experience of grace, the grandmother may
simply have mistaken the Misfit for her son Bailey. She is obviously under
great pressure while he holds the gun on her, she is dizzy and confused, and
she has fallen down into a ditch. In such a state, suddenly recognizing her

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 DOUGLAS NOVICH LEONARD 53

son's shirt which the Misfit is now wearing, the grandmother might easily
have mistaken him for Bailey. It only seems to her that her head "cleared
for an instant." So when she calls the Misfit one of her children, she may
mean it literally and not be speaking love in the person of Jesus. The point
is, regardless of the symbolic force of her childlike smiling face as she lies
dead, the grandmother may not have been touched by grace at all. If one
has read O'Connor's other stories and letters, he knows otherwise—or
thinks he knows. But O'Connor herself avoids claiming that her characters
have been touched by the grace of God. She may intend that the
grandmother has been touched, but she cannot demand it. Because she has
tried to write a spiritually mimetic fiction, her work does not insist that any
given character be saved or damned, whatever the evidence. She imitates
the situation as well as she can in all its ambiguity, and she hopes to God
she is right. When the Misfit looks down at the dead grandmother, he does
not know she has represented the grace of God to him. The signs are

susceptible of various interpretations. He requires further revelation.

This is what O'Connor meant when she said that the meaning of her
story should "go on expanding" in the mind of the reader. "A Good Man Is
Hard to Find" is not a tract predictably illustrating theological doctrines.
The story is a simulation of the experience of grace. The reader is shown
that the nature of grace is superhuman, self-sacrificing love, yet that grace
paradoxically flows through deeply flawed vessels. In fact, the devil
himself is involved in God's redemptive process. One also sees that grace
attends violence and that it can itself be violent. Further, one sees that its

acceptance is a free act.

But, finally, the meaning the reader should experience in the story is that
the working of grace is mysterious. Reading it, in fact, involves an act of
faith. The clues are there for readers who have eyes to see them—a gesture,
a childlike smile on the face of a dead old woman—but those clues are

equally subject to a naturalistic interpretation—mistaken identity, an

accident, evidence of a random fate which seems ironic only because we

persist in trying to see an ultimate purpose behind it. O'Connor helps her
readers to see the working of grace in her stories; there she provides the
faith. But what is implied is O'Connor's hope that readers might learn
something about the action of grace in their own lives by recognizing it in
her fiction. O'Connor continually discouraged secular or psychological
readings of her stories. She insisted that as a Catholic writer she invested
them with theological meaning. Yet just as strenuously she discouraged
credulous readings. For O'Connor, faith entailed doubt, a sense that life
can be read either theologically or materialistically. She wished to remind
the reader that ultimate truth is not presently demonstrable. O'Connor

expected her ideal reader to see all the possibilities inhering in the fictional
situation and then, led by the author, to realize, or re-realize, that faith—
the seeking for grace—is all that matters. O'Connor's meaning is that the

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 54 "A Good Man Is Hard to Find"

world is still an open system. If grace is possible, it must be sought. And, if

grace exists, whoever seeks, finds.

Douglas Novich Leonard

Washington and Lee University

Notes

'Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners, ed. Sally and Robert

Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1957), p. 96.

2Flannery O'Connor, The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor

(New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1971), p. 132. All further
references to "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" will be to this edition and
cited parenthetically in the text.
3Mystery and Manners, p. 111.

4Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being, ed. Sally Fitzgerald (New

York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1979), p. 373.
5Mystery and Manners, p. 112.
6 The Habit
of Being, p. 437.
7Clara Claiborne Park, "Crippled Laughter: Toward Understanding
Flannery O'Connor," The American Scholar, 51, No. 2 (Spring, 1982),
253.
8Park, p. 256.
9 The Habit
of Being, p. 437.
10Mystery and Manners, pp. 112-13.
11The Habit
of Being, p. 389.
I2W. S. Marks III, "Advertisements for Grace: Flannery O'Connor's 'A
Good Man Is Hard to Find,'" Studies in Short Fiction, IV (Fall, 1966), 20.
13Mystery and Manners, pp. 115-16.
HThe Habit of Being, pp. 389-90.
15Mystery and Manners, p. 117.
"
l6Marion Montgomery, "Miss Flannery's 'Good Man,' The Denver

Quarterly, III (Spring, 1968), 10.

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