A Good Man Is Hrad To Find Essay, Research Paper

A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O Connor

What happens to the grandmother in the story?

The grandmother is at a very different point from the beginning of the story, A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O Connor than at the end, not just in terms of her physical presence but her mentality too. In the beginning the reader is clued into the grandmother s shallow thoughts of death. The way the grandmother worries about if she dies and how people will perceive what she was wearing, and then decide based on this if she was a lady, epitomizes her personality of being superficial and apprehensive. Later on in the story the grandmother s readiness for death isn t quite apparent. This is shown with her behavior with the misfit; she shows herself to be the least prepared for death.

The grandmother is emotionally dependent, has a desperate need to be able to talk to someone, and thrives for attention. Through the course of the story her dependence on these things is tested, which forces her to change how she would normally act. The confrontation between the misfit and the grandmother is when this occurs. In the beginning of the story the grandmother relies on her family in order to feel balanced and happy in life. When she s left alone with the misfit, she becomes helpless and lonely.

The conversation between the misfit and the grandmother depicts what has actually happened to the grandmother, and the difference of where she stands at the end compared to the beginning of the story. The misfit gets her to the point where she can see and accept the action of grace in her own life and extend it to another, the misfit changes her by getting her to the place where she can be a good woman. By doing this, the grandmother also changes the misfit, by making him in a sense a good man. This portrays another way that the grandmother s eminence in life has changed. In the beginning she seemed to have very little or almost no influence on others, but by the end of the story one can see that she has undoubtedly had an impact on the misfit. When she was first left alone with the misfit she had absolutely no affect on him. She was just trying to persuade and convince him that he was a good man, so she could get out of the situation she was in. She finally realizes that this isn t helping and listens to what he has to say. 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. It s obvious that by this point she has definitely had a tremendous affect on him.

It isn t just death that happens to the grandmother in this story, it s what the misfit has done to change her. Where she s at the end of the story compared to the beginning is completely different. She has changed mentally: the last thing she would have thought before was that she could have a profound and impacting conversation with the misfit, an unstable and generally evil human being. The grandmother sees the misfit s views on the world, and eventually changes him too.