O’connor’s A Good Man Is Hard To Find
From the title of the story itself, I was already expecting the plot to be showing the negative side of the characters. True enough, the characters involved seem to be downplaying their positive side as persons and indeed thrive on the conflicts their circumstances brought them. Every step along the way is a test of the family member’s character.
The bad guys who did the killing and whose presence have been foreshadowed already by the grandmother are cold-blooded murderers who do not mind ending the lives of even the old and the young characters there. Being a classic story most often included in the studies of the young (in school), I was expecting a rather conservative storyline instead of a violent one. So it was with great surprise for me that the story ended with less to be desired.
Even if I was preparing myself to be open-minded in reading materials such as these, I still can’t help feeling bad about the outcome of the story. It definitely changes my perception of things. The story reminds me that indeed, there is always a good and a bad side in every person. When the grandmother touches the “Misfit” before she was killed, I believe she was then showing compassion and forgiveness to the person in question. It could also be an appeal to spare her life.
However, I wish to reiterate that after all the experiences the grandmother must have gone through, she can already see through a person’s true self, and perhaps, just perhaps, she has seen the goodness of the killer inspite of it all. On the other hand, the Misfit also showed a willingness to be humane when he recognized the possibility of the grandmother becoming good in the true sense of the word, if only she can be reminded all the time. I believe the Misfit’s sentence was a metaphor.
