Dissecting ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ by Flannery O’Connor

“No pleasure but meanness”

You have to wonder at all the amazing tales that would’ve been if O’Connor hadn’t died at the young age of thirty-nine (she died of lupus). It was a bit of a secret shame that I hadn’t read any of her tales yet, so I was glad I finally got to Good Man.

When dissecting a story, I like to mull over its themes and messages. One of the best ways to do this is to try and describe the story without using any story events, plot, or characters. So, what is this one about? Death, certainly. Good vs. Bad. Family.

What made this story so darned effective, in my view, were its use of priming and the fully fleshed out characters.

To get the most from this experience, I suggest you join us in reading the tale first, and then returning here for the conversation. There be many spoilers ahead! Also, all views below are purely my own, and up for question. These are simply what I took from the tale and we all come to stories from different places. Did I miss anything?

Just a wee note on the copy of the story I have share – it seems to have quite a few errors in it for some reason, but I’ve lifted it as is instead of trying to fix it.

Join us

Here at Short Story Club, we read the very best short stories to see what we can learn from them from both a reader and writer point of view. I’ll provide links to all stories for free, and then we get together to analyse what made them so effective. Join us. Did I mention it’s free?

A drive through the tale

The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida.

There’s something of a theme I’m seeing in all the tales we discuss. The opening gambit is straight to the point, very clear on what the character(s) want, and the author wastes no time in shoving us right into the story’s events, or what Edith Wharton refers to as ‘the attack’.

The rule that the first page of a novel ought to contain the germ of the whole is even more applicable to the short story, because in the latter case the trajectory is so short that flash and sound nearly coincide. (Edith Wharton, The Writing of Fiction)

In Good Man, we see right away that the grandmother doesn’t want to go to Florida. This isn’t only an indication of her being selfish and not getting her own way, but it’s the whole story in a nutshell. She doesn’t want to go, so she sabotages the mission to divert it, and that’s why they stumble upon their doom/judgement.

“I wouldn’t take my children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it.”

What a busy-body the grandmother is! We’re still in the opening paragraph and we’ve been introduced to the grandmother’s desire not to go to Florida and go to east Tennessee instead. We’ve also been introduced to The Misfit who has escaped from prison. And we’ve also seen our first use of priming in the quote above.

Priming is more of a hint than a full on description to invoke foreboding, and its use is scattered all over this tale, priming us for the end result when they meet their doom.

(There is a difference between ‘priming’ and ‘foreshadowing’. Foreshadowing, is typically larger than priming. With foreshadowing, the writer might spend more words to purposefully draw the reader’s attention and building dread.)

Then, we get introduced to the whole family. Busy-body grandmother, who is our main character. Bailey, the suffering son who puts up with her. ‘The children’s mother’ who never gets named and so we instantly feel the contempt the grandmother feels for her. The two hearty kids, June Star and John Wesley, a baby, and their cat, Pitty Sing.

She argues some more and June Star jibes that the grandmother wouldn’t stay at home to be queen for a day.

“Yes and what would you do if this fellow, The Misfit, caught you?”

More priming here. O’Connor is planting lots of seeds early on. It gives the story a certain direction. Will they meet this bad guy? Is that what we’re being set up for? These small primings aren’t so obvious, so we read on to find out.

Grandmother continues to argue her case that she doesn’t want to go to Florida and loses (for now). But:

The next morning the grandmother was the first one in the car, ready to go.

This is an excellent painting of her character. She won’t let anything go. She will keep on trying. We go through how she’s dressed (comparing herself to the children’s mother) and we get still more priming:

In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady.

And more priming on the trip:

They passed a large cotton field with five or [s]ix graves fenced in the middle of it.

There are six of them in the car (not including baby and cat), so this serves as an equal image. There are six people in the car, there are (five or) six graves.

None of these primers are done with a whole lot of words to keep our focus on them as readers, but they all add up nicely to the overall effect of the story.

We get a humorous tale from the grandmother to settle the kids down. Then we get to Red Sammy’s where they eat (which turns out to be something of a last supper). There’s more tension between the family and the workers at the restaurant.

“These days you don’t know who to trust,” he said. “Ain’t that the truth?”

More priming here from Red Sammy himself. This is before they get into talking about The Misfit and generally how you can’t trust anyone these days.

They get in the car again and the grandmother wakes up as they pass a town called Toombsboro. This is another piece of subtle priming. The sound, with the added ‘b’ evokes images of graves and death. Evidently, there is no place called Toombsboro here in real life, but there is a Toomsboro. The extra ‘b’ is purposeful.

And now, we get to the stage where the grandmother wins. She is craftful in using the kids to get what she wants. She sells the house and its secret panels to them so the kids start badgering poor Bailey and he eventually relents.

“All right,” Bailey said, “but get this: this is the only time we’re going to stop for anything like this. This is the one and only time.”

Even in Bailey’s outburst is someone of a final sounding, ominous piece of priming.

And then, as they go further and further down a dirt road, Bailey getting all the more anxious about the state of the place, Grandmother has a terrible thought. The house she’s thinking about, the place where she’d manipulated them to go see, is somewhere else entirely. She’s taken them down the wrong path. She’s made a mistake. And before she can say anything to admit this, Pitty Sing leaps onto Bailey’s shoulder and causes them to crash.

“We’ve had an ACCIDENT!”

They all make it out of the car wreck, out of the gulch off the side of the road where the car as landed right-side-up. The kids are very excited to have had an ACCIDENT.

This is where the story turns, and rather quickly. They are in trouble, in the middle of nowhere.

It was a big black battered hearselike automobile.

This is the final piece of priming that we get as the tale nears its end. Strangers stop their car to help. But it’s something of a hearse which carries obvious connotations.

The family meet The Misfit and meet their end, with the grandmother being the one to beg The Misfit to pray and to let them go, that he isn’t really that much of a bad man.

“Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!”

But the tale ends in the worst of ways. He is repulsed by Grandmother’s insistence that he can be saved if all he’d do is repent and pray with her. They are all shot.

And there, the tale ends as The Misfit speaks to his two helpers.

Excellent use of characters

There are a few things that stood out for me when reading this. The first, was the masterful use of character work from the get-go. Very quickly, we get a full picture of the family and what they all want.

How does O’Connor achieve this in such a small space? In a word – humour.

The family take swipes at each other all through the tale, even at the end. Here are a few of my favourites from June Star:

“She wouldn’t stay at home for a million bucks,” June Star said. “Afraid she’d miss something. She has to go everywhere we go.”

“But nobody’s killed,” June Star said with disappointment.

And this one that shows that even the baby can’t deal with the grandmother’s crap:

She rolled her eyes and screwed up her mouth and stuck her leathery thin face into his smooth bland one. Occasionally he gave her a faraway smile.

And this rather comical bit when they are getting out of the crash:

The grandmother was curled up under the dashboard, hoping she was injured so that Bailey’s wrath would not come down on her all at once.

All in all, they’re just plain old-fashioned funny which is endearing in and of itself. And the mastery of this goes against the notion that short stories can’t be character based. Very quickly, we get a full picture of these characters, and each is very real.

All that priming

As mentioned when we went on our drive through the tale, there are multiple and regular primers for what is about to happen. They see five or six graves. They are going past Toombsboro. And there’s more spread throughout the tale.

Now, as a writer, if I were typing up this tale, I may have the notion to think that all this is a little too ‘on the nose’, too obvious. But is that wrong? If the hints are small enough, and elegantly done, does it matter if the writer feels it’s too much? That’s something I’ll certainly mull over in my own works.

The Misfit

The Misfit gives me purified creeps. I’d put him up there with the likes of Blue Duck as one of the most terrifying villains in fiction, and The Misfit only gets a few pages.

(If you know who Blue Duck is, we should be friends!).

“God never made a finer woman than my mother and my daddy’s heart was pure gold,” he said.

The way he talks is so high and mighty and evil, it makes me want to shiver reading it. He has big views of himself, compares himself to Jesus. And the talk at the end quickly starts to reveal religious overtones. Is he the bringer of judgement for the grandmother?

“My daddy said I was a different breed of dog from my brothers and sisters.”

Grandmother goes on about how she knows he’s of good stock. And he tells her he’s from good stock, but he came out different to his brothers and sisters. He was a different breed of dog.

“I never was a bad boy that I remember of,” The Misfit said in an almost dreamy voice, “but somewheres along the line I done something wrong and got sent to the penitentiary. I was buried alive,” and he looked up and held her attention to him by a steady stare.

And his almost non-sensical talk is, to me, rather effective in painting a picture of someone who really isn’t well.

“Turn to the right, it was a wall,” The Misfit said, looking up again at the cloudless sky. “Turn to the left, it was a wall. Look up it was a ceiling, look down it was a floor. I forget what I done, lady. I set there and set there, trying to remember what it was I done and I ain’t recalled it to this day. Oncet in a while, I would think it was coming to me, but it never come.”

It’s ambiguous, creepy, and religious in places, but the whole scene just has me wanting to never ever meet someone like The Misfit.

What does it mean to be good or bad

So, what to take of the whole story? Why is this tale still spoken of with such reverence?

The deepest levels of this story speak to what it means to be good or bad. The Misfit comes along at the end, bringing judgement.

What did you think of the tale? Were you as creeped out as I was by The Misfit? What did you take away from reading the story?