Flannery O'Connor

In Flannery O'Connor's short story "A Good Man is Hard to Find", the author uses the character of the Misfit to remind both the other characters in the story as well as her readers that none of us can escape from our past. O'Connor begins the story with a false dichotomy: She presents us with two apparently opposing possibilities. There are the characters who have free will, who are the agents of their own destinies like the Misfit and his fellow criminals who choose to act in the way that they do, who commit murder because it is convenient and because they want to. And then there are the characters - the members of the family setting off on their car trip - who have no choices at all. But by the end of the story she has made us see - primarily through the character of the Misfit - that in the lives of each one of us free will and fate are well mixed. Although, this being the South and this being a story by O'Connor, the balance is more heavily weighted toward fate than free will.

The story is quintessentially about the South (these characters could not be believed if they were not Southern; their Southerness is what makes all of their other traits believable). But it is a particular kind of story about the South, a story about the South as it has changed and as its people have changed since the Civil War. And yet as much as this is a story about a place and how that place was and was no longer during a specific period of time, it is also a morality tale. This story is about

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Category: Literature - F