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Throughout the story there were two main characters; the narrator (assumed Granddaughter), and Mataji the Grandmother. Both characters would be best described as “dynamic”, as they both have many personality traits, ranging from good to bad throughout the story. As the story itself follows two plots being present and past, similarities were noticed between the Granddaughter and Mataji’s actions. Proving the strong relationship between the Granddaughter and Mataji.…
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Throughout, the story we see the grandmother being manipulative, deceitful, and selfish. Aruther Breatha, the author of the article “O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find” even compares the grandmother morally and philosophically to the serial-killing Misfit (Breatha 246). The grandmother is seen being manipulative when she is trying to change her son Baily’s mind about going to Florida, so she can go to Tennessee. She is described as “seizing at every chance to change Bailey’s mind” (O’Connor 364). She even tries to make Baily feel bad about taking his children in the direction where a criminal is a loose (O’ Connor 364). She has no care, for what the family as a whole want to do, and is only concerned, with what she wants to do, and where she wants to go on vacation. When all her attempts to stop the family from going to Florida fail, she starts to become deceitful. The first of her deceitful action is bring the cat along even though Baily said not to so, then when the family is on the road the grandmother want to stop at an old plantation she used to visit as a child. Baily does not want to stop so she lies and tell the children that “There was a secret panel in this house” (O’Connor 368), and that it was filled with silver. This of course drives the children to bug, Baily, and the grandmother get what she wants. Once, the family turns down…
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‘my grandmother is a brilliant storyteller and conversationalist when she is not attacking people with bones in her words.’…
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Throughout this story, the grandmother struggles to find what the definition of “good” is. The grandmother wears a hat to show others that she is a lady. However, this hat is also a symbol for her foolish ethical code. When the grandmother prepares for the car trip with the family, she dresses up in collars and cuffs to show she is a lady “In case of an accident” (12). The grandmother acts as if she is completely undisturbed with the fact that she would be dead in this situation and remains unconcerned that her son, daughter-in-law, and three grandchildren would have also possibly died. The grandmother, however, only cares about her appearance as a lady. This silly concern shows how self-centered she really is and how delicate her ethical conviction is. This symbol further develops when the family becomes, in fact, involved in a car accident. The grandmother’s hat falls apart, much like her ethical conviction, and after she continued to stare at it, she eventually “let it fall on the ground.”(96) Once she is thrown from the car and her family is face-to-face with the Misfit, the brim of the grandmother’s hat then falls off. Her appearance as a lady melts as the damaged hat falls.…
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As the story opens we are introduced to a grandmother who is having an external conflict with her family over the vacation location they have chosen. The grandmother thinks very highly of herself and her decisions, so she begins to try and manipulate her family into agreeing with her on going to a different place. The author hints to us that the grandmother thinks highly of herself by the way that she descibes her clothing to the reader. She picks out her clothing based upon her thoughts that "In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady."(Paragraph 12) The reader can only wonder why such a self righteous woman could be so focused on the opinions of others even in her thoughts of afterlife. The grandmother also selfishly brings along her cat in secrecy, despite the fact that her son Bailey "didn't like to arrive at a motel with a cat". (Paragraph 10) She puts herself to such importance that she does not believe that she needs to listen to her sons requests, but rather do what she wants to. She scolds the children about the way they act in the car and claims that she herself would not act in that manner, which also signifies the fact that she thinks of herself as a righteous person. Immediately after scolding the kids for their actions,…
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In the story the author deal with the idea of “good” in different ways trying to show that only, because of being a “good man” doesn’t mean to be “moral” person. She represents most of these ideas by the character of the grandmother, who had, with the Misfit, a big role in the story becoming the two of them the major characters of the story. The grandmother represents a woman that thinks she is morally higher, she never thinks she can be wrong doesn’t seeing her hypocrisy and selfishness, until the point that she lies to her family about the location of a place, or lying to a children about a panel. For the grandmother a person that is a “good man” is that one that has the same thoughts as her, for example for the grandmother the Misfit a “good man” because she thinks that man couldn’t shoot a lady. The role of the lady is important because it appears since the beginning to the end of the story, just in the first pages of the story when the author shows what the grandmother wears for the journey: “…, but the grandmother had on a navy blue straw sailor hat with bunch of white violets on the brim and a navy blue dress with a small white dot in the print. Her collars and cuffs were white organdy trimmed with lace and at her neckline she had pinned a purple spray of cloth violets containing a sachet. In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at one that she was a lady.”…
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O’Connor paints her own picture of what the grandmother believes to be a “good man.” The grandmother seems to treat goodness mostly as a function of being decent, having good manners, and coming from a family of "the right people." At the beginning of the story the grandmother discusses a story of her past love explaining how he was the most upright gentleman she met, claiming he too was a “good man.” She stated “he was a very good- looking man and a gentleman and that he brought her watermelon every Sunday afternoon with his initials cut in it, E.A.T.” (O’Connor 98). The grandmother was unique in the way she described…
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The first facade that the Grandmother tries to portray of herself is when she expressed how important it was for her to dress up during the road trip so that “anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once she was a lady”, with this statement one can see that the Grandmother is morally and spiritually disconnected. On the way to Florida Grandmother's character slowly unravels as she criticizes the “little packaninny” they saw standing outside with no pants on, stating that the “little niggers in the country don't have things like we do” suggesting that they were better off than most people which is contradictory to what most Christians believe(Bedford/St. Martin's 141). The Grandmother nags her son into taking them to visit an old plantation…
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In this story, the Grandmother considers herself “the lady” of the family. The Grandmother considers herself having higher standards of other people and frequently passes judgment on others. She is a very talkative, nagging, narcissistic, and manipulative woman that frequently bosses the other family members around. For example, The Grandmother says, “Here this fellow that calls himself The Misfit is aloose from the Federal Pen and headed toward Florida and you read here what it says he did to these people. Just you read it. I wouldn't take my children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it. I couldn't answer to my conscience if I did” (O’Connor 436). She also…
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The grandmother in the story is described as an idiosyncratic and demanding character. Those traits are the opposite of what people imagine a grandmother to be. A grandmother is someone who is caring, believes in family, and would do anything for her family. Bailey, the son of the grandmother, decides to take the family on a road trip to Florida bringing his wife, their three children, and of course the grandmother.The grandmother insists on not going due to the fact there is a person known as the Misfit, who is a criminal where she read in the paper he is headed to Florida. The grandmother tries to convince Bailey to reconsider the trip to Florida and to think of what is best for the…
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What is a grandmother? A sweet nurturing elderly woman who gives words of wisdom whom would do anything for her kin? “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor describes a lonely grandmother living with her son who would, not so much, do anything for her family. The grandmother goes on vacation with her son and his family, because she does not want to miss out on anything yet finds herself in a predicament when taking a turn off the vacation route running into the Misfit, an escaped convict from the Federal pen. Though the grandmother is a woman of superior, her encounter with the Misfit makes her come into realization that she has imperfections just…
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Bailey the grandmother’s son I would say is a “flat character. In the story his attitude never changes. He’s very quiet and gets pushed around by his mother. I would say that he gets taken advantage of because of this very reason. June Star, Bailey’s daughter and the granddaughter, isn’t very polite in the story. She’s very rude, mean spirited, and seems to be ill willed towards other people. Instead of her being sympathetic when the family got into an accident, she was disappointed that no one in the family was killed. John Wesley, Bailey’s dad and the grandson, is portrayed as a happy go lucky 8 year old boy. When the grandmother mentions going to see the house that she remembers, John seems very excited to be able to explore the secret panel. The Grandmother is characterized as rude and rather pushy with her views. Her son, Bailey, seems annoyed with the way that his mother acts. The reader’s perception of the Grandmother isn’t that great. She shows that she is a racist with her comment that she makes when she sees a little black kid. Her pushiness is what caused the family to get in the situation that they were in in the first place. The Grandmother shows no sympathy for other people. She is the worse out of the whole family.…
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The Grandmother has an opinion on everything and feels that her way of doing things is the only way to do them. She chastises another character from the story, John Wesley, for what she thinks is inappropriate amount of respect for his home state. At any opportunity, she makes it her business to judge other people and remark at the lack of their goodness, without evidently having any of her own. She gives little attention to her own behavior, convinced that being a lady is the only virtue, and she, by dressing as one is the only lady and…
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The second characteristic the Grandmother has as a tragic hero is being judgmental. There are many examples of her judging others in the story. She wears a “nice” outfit for the trip so that if she is found dead on the side of the highway,…
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"Look, Darling," she said. "At some point history will judge us, and it's judgement can be cruel and arbitrary: just look at Richard III. So I'm writing a little piece. Because they should know that we survivors got through it the best way we could, through it was sometimes…
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