A Good Man Is Hard to Find
Flannery O'Connor
 This story initiates with an unnamed grandmother complaining to her son, Bailey, that she does not want to go to Florida but to Tennessee instead, for the family vacation. The family goes to Florida anyway. She spites them by getting up early and waiting in the car, dressed in her Sunday best, so that if she should die in an accident she will be recognized as "a lady." The grandmother talks almost continuously during the trip, recalling her youth in the Old South and commenting on various things they come across. She says children used to be more respectful of their home states and their parents, and that people did right in those days. She then catches sight of a "cute little pickaninny" waving from the door of a shack, and remarks that he probably doesn't own any britches. When the family stops at an old diner for lunch, she engages the owner, Red Sammy, in conversation about an escaped convict, a murderer known as "The Misfit." The grandmother agrees with Sammy's assertion that a good man is very hard to find. After they return on the road again, the grandmother, trying to detour the family away from Florida, begins telling the children stories about a nearby home that she had visited as a child. Upon hearing that it has secret passages, the children become fascinated and want to visit the house, and they pester their father until he agrees to let them go and follow grandmother's directions. When her directions lead them down a dirt road, she realizes that the house is, in fact, in Tennessee and not Georgia. Flustered, she upsets her cat, which panics, causing Bailey to flip the car and end up in a ditch below the road. The children are excited and view the accident as an adventure, and the grandmother fakes an internal injury to evoke sympathy. The family waits for help. A car pulls up and three men get out, the leader a shirtless, bespectacled man. All three have guns. The man in glasses instructs his cohorts to inspect the family's car and engages Bailey in polite conversation until the grandmother identifies him as an escaped convict known as "The Misfit." The Misfit shot his own father, he says, though he says that's only what he's been told—he doesn't believe it. As The Misfit instructs his accomplices to murder the family one by one, the grandmother begins pleading for her own life by flattering The Misfit. When The Misfit ignores her pleas, she becomes speechless. Panicked, she attempts to witness about Jesus. The Misfit becomes visibly angry: he is angry with Christ for having given no physical evidence for His existence, casting doubt about the legitimacy of Christianity. He does not want to waste his life serving a figure who may not exist, nor does he want to displease an almighty God who may exist; he has settled on the idea that "There's no pleasure but meanness." The grandmother suddenly exclaims "Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!", and reaches out and touches The Misfit. He recoils and shoots her three times. When the accomplice finishes murdering the family, The Misfit takes a moment to clean his glasses, concluding that "she [the grandmother] would have been a good woman, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." He echoes O'Connor's traditional Christian view that this is properly the role of the conscience informed by the Holy Spirit. When his accomplice comments on the fun that they've had in killing, The Misfit tells him, "It's no real pleasure in life." Again, in O'Connor's view, a phony Christian—that is, the grandmother—through an act of violence finally comes to be genuinely converted. A good man/woman is indeed hard to find. At last the grandmother humbles herself, realizing that she's no better than a murderer and misfit herself--for such are metaphorically her babies, part of the fallen human family. (He is wearing her son's shirt by then--as if to increase symbolically the connection.) She can finally receive saving grace.