Yes - I have to admit the violence shocked me. Not at all what I was expecting. Somehow I kept hoping that it wasn't going to end like that...

I thought it was interesting the way that the disaster came upon them as a result of a set of little things that the old Grandmother had done - she wanted to see the house, made up the secret passage to encourage the kids, remembered that the house was not in Georgia but in Tennessee, which caused the cat to escape (which she shouldn't have had in the car anyway), which caused the accident - and even then, when the men came along, she had to admit she'd recognized The Misfit....a series of little mishaps leading to a total disaster.

A very strange and fascinating story.

I was rereading this story for the first time in many years, and after having read much of Flannery O'Connor's other work.

I think that the violence IS the story. Without it, there'd be no story.

I think it's about a group of bumbling, very ordinary people who think they know the difference between "good" and "bad," but who are brought to a confrontation with real evil and would have learned (if they'd lived) how much more powerful it is than they'd ever imagined.

The Misfit articulates the religious center of the story when he keeps worrying at the end about whether Jesus actually could raise the dead.

The title of the story, the cliche that a good man is hard to find, is also worth looking at--for a good man turns out to be far harder to find than these people ever realized.

The author's vision of the world is so dark and bleak that she sees a very dire need for the grace offered by the Christian faith. I think that her point is to slam us with her point: "This is serious. This is a matter of life and death. This affects you. And you. And you. Evil is real, and it just might triumph."

I think that there is a lot of wry humor in this story, though it is always subordinated to the thrust toward the violent end. The way in which the family members fail to understand one another while pursuing their individual agendas is funny.

She sees the Christian faith as calamitously revolutionary. I'm reminded of her novella, The Violent Bear It Away, which she prefaces with a passage from St. Matthew 11:12 (she's citing from the Douay Bible):

From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away."

She seems to be implying that evil is so all-pervasive and so incomprehensibly powerful in the world that it will take violence and upheaval to uproot it--or even to persuade one individual to see a glimmering of God's truth.

It's funny, but I think the Misfit is the good guy. O'Connor was a Southern Modernist, working as a contemporary to Eudora Welty and coming off the heels of Faulkner. Among many of the questions Southern writers in this time were trying to work out was the perception of the South as a region, and trying to define its literary culture, especially in its development around the "Old South" moonlight and magnolia ideas that were so especially popular then.

Looking at the story's context, I read it as kind of a metaphor for the kinds of sensibilities Southerners felt, and O'Connor was acutely aware of. The grandmother is the Old South, determined to be a lady above all, remembering the way things used to be when she was a girl. Her family is detatched from that, but they've still got her in the car, listening to her romanticize an old plantation that isn't even there. I don't think O'Connor created the grandmother's legend of the old house just to get the family in a ditch; the grandmother's insistence on finding the old plantation parallels a Southern insistence to cling to the myth of the Old South, the kind of Gone With the Wind ideal that simply can't exist in a post-WWI America.
If the grandmother is the Old South, the Misfit is the other guy--the new wave, nihilistic, on the run, dangerous and feared with a small, motley crew in tow. He defeats the grandmother, that can be read literally in the violence O'Connor uses, as it should be, but any weekend magazine freelancer can write violence. I think O'Connor meant it as an interpreation of her society--those who cling fiercely to a dead ideal will be shattered just as fiercely. It won't work, can't work, in a society so removed from the Old South sensibilities.

Okay, so I've gotten a little off track, I hope my reading isn't too far out there for this crowd. I like what's being touched at about the Grandmother's "faith," and I think it is just as interesting to note that she can't even articulate it clearly. She's spent her whole life learning and practicing a faith that she can bet her life on, but when it comes to the crux of the story, she becomes a mumbling ninny who can offer nothing more than the abstractions of God and gentleman. The Misfit, the crook, murderer, social outcast--he's the only character who evidences an actual thought process about Christianity. Granted, his conclusions have most Southern-seated Believers squirming in their choir robes, but again, his conclusions on Jesus were at least more tested and hypothesized than the Grandmother's Sunday servings... I think again this speaks to my earlier ideas about O'Connor's contrast of the Old South with the reworking--Grandmother's old ideals simply don't hold up to the Misfit's; they can't hold up unless they are grounded in something other than an ideal that died decades before.

Too off track? Does anyone have a different reading? This is one of my favorite short works, I'm glad it was posted here.

Sorry that I can't offer anything of use here - I read the story and was completely perplexed. Had previously read Everything That Rises Must Converge, long ago, but was still of an age where I could enjoy things without having to understand them.

Reason for my pointless posting: to say thanks, esp to Snickerdoodle for dissolving some of that perplexion (?) and giving a bit more meaning to the story!

Yes, I thought it was funny. And I believe the violence gives meaning to the story.

I first read this at 18 and was immediately at one with the intensity of the tale. I think of it as being in the zone - where I am in the story, feeling to the core of my soul what a character is feeling. There is no reader, there is only the story. The concentrated frisson of knowing death is inevitable and soon was absolutely intoxicating.

At that time the story was for me no metaphor for anything but my life. I was going through a re-examination of my relationship with God, so of course I responded to it. Also, though I felt the panic of the Grandmother, I also identified her with my own grandmother who I despised as being religious without a true understanding of God. (Ah, the arrogance of an 18-year-old....)

Rereading it 30 years later I still get echoes of that first reading. Still and all, I look at the names and note that grandson John Wesley recalls the early Methodist Leader who was also into prison reform in early Georgia. I didn't get that joke the first time. Also, that Bobby Lee is Robert (E.) Lee. So, of course, one begins to look for more meaning. Is there significance to Grandmother pointing out Stone Mountain? If you've never been there you wouldn't perhaps know that on a huge granite face of the mountain is carved in bas relief the figures of Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Stonewall Jackson - heroes of the mourned Confederacy. That fits well with Snicker's ideas above and which sound right to me.

Also note well, that at the time, driving though the south one saw lots of signs demanding that one Repent!

A Good Man is Hard to Find. I read that phrase and wonder if it hadn't simply become a meaningless cliche to the characters. Grandmother says it, but somehow I don't believe she really understands what a good man, or woman, is. Is it 21st century sensibilities that make us cringe at the pickaninny comment? Or, as I believe, did O'Connor intend it to show us that Grandmother was not the good woman she thought she was? Along with the manipulation and deceit about the cat, of course. Yes, those are not killing offenses, but they are indicators of character flaws, aren't they? The kind of flaws that we like to point out as other people's hypocrisy.

I find I don't have much to add, either. Perhaps this story is too close to "home" for me. I grew up in the deep south and am all too familiar with the south Georgia countryside, due to childhood visits to family. Perhaps it is that I am turned off by the focus on the grotesque, which seems unbalanced and extreme, to me. (Granted, this gives the author her blunt power). I've read a lot about O'Connor; over and over, she emphacized what a Catholic writer she was. However, I cannot relate to her dark view of what I know of the Catholic church.

I read a biography of O'Connor years ago and was stuck by how she suffered physically. Surely the great pain she endured would have influenced her dark view of the world in the extreme. I also was privileged to hear O'Connor speak at my college, the year before she died. She came across as witty, eccentric, and very ironic, in her humor.

Woodnymph, you would probably enjoy her correspondence The Habit of Being which is "witty, eccentric, and very ironic, in her humor." Are you old enough to remember river baptisms? I was very surprised when I learned she was a devout Catholic. I thought she nailed the Southern Baptist ethos in her work (not necessarily in AGMIHTF, though) and the evangelicals epitomized by those river baptisms.

I read this story without knowing anything about it and with little experience with Southern fiction. I was completely shocked by the ending; in fact I re-read it because I thought I had misunderstood. Thinking of it in the context of a metaphor makes sense and helps me understand. I will admit I have been mulling over the story, unable to make much sense of it.

I lived in Atlanta for 4 years and was quite unhappy there, so that also colors my interpretation and feelings about the story. I'm not sure I want to read any more O'Connor, great writer that she undoubtedly is.

Siobhan, I carried on reading a few more of the stories in the book - and they didn't get any lighter. I will probably return the rest to the library unread. What I have enjoyed, as so often on this forum, is how those of you with a better connection to/understanding of this writer have enhanced my experience. Thank you!

However, as a pseudo-Taoist Anglo-German with no acquaintance of the American South, I think I can now assume that Flannery O'Connor is not for me!

I don't have much to add here and I lack the eloquence to really capture what I would want to say about this story.

When my younger self read this story, I read it very much at face value, but I think I was also exploring other southern writers at the time, so there was always that parable of the South and its various representations floating around in my mind. I didn't grow up in the South, but I did grow up a small town without exposure to culture that you would get in a big city where Baptist fundamentalism thrived. There was something about the grotesque and searing irony of O'Connor's stories that appealed to me, and some of the characters she created were people I knew, people I had met, and the places she took us to were places similar to where I had lived. They might be presented in a very hyperbolic manner, but under extraordinary circumstances, I would have said, yes, I've met some of these people.

Of course, when I read this story now, I think of it in more nostalgic terms. Many of the places she describes have changed radically since the 60s. I do love some of her descriptions, though, such as the young mother "whose face was as broad and innocent as a cabbage and was tied around with a green head-kerchief that had two points on the top like rabbit's ears."

If you are turned off by the violence and grotesque imagery, there are other southern authors that I think have captured the quaintness and idiosyncratic nature of the South with charm and humor. Bailey White is someone who springs to mind.

Chris, I remember river baptisms very well, although I am not and never was a Baptist. I agree with you that O'Connor depicted the Southern Baptist ethos remarkably well and I, too, was surprised to learn she was a Catholic, relatively rare in the Georgia I knew in those days.

Is "The Habit of Being" the same as her collected letters, which I am now reading? I must say I can enjoy and appreciate her letters far more than her short stories.

And yes, there are other great southern writers whose world view is not so bleak. O'Connor says in her letters that she was very much influenced by the grotesqueries of Edgar Allen Poe.

I forgot to ask earlier, do you think O'Connor's illness and the fact that her father also died when she was young (didn't they both have lupus?) factored into the sort of perverse nature of her writing? I am always reminded when I read her of how young she really was when she died -- just 39, I think.

Yes, Woodnymph, The Habit of Being is a collection of her letters published in 1979 and edited by Sally Fitzgerald. And as you said, totally unlike her stories in tone. Highly recommended for those of you who do not like the stories.

I think in many ways O'Connor works in that space between what the bible and preacher man demand of us and what we can manage as flawed beings. She isn't interested in those indifferent to the demands of God, but in those who suffer from their failure to reach a state of grace. I agree with Snicker that The Misfit is the hero. He knows his behavior is not "good in the sight of the Lord" and he cogitates upon it. He cares, in daily life, about Jesus.

Wise Blood, my favorite O'Connor tale, works this vein also.

georgia peach, yes, both did indeed die of Lupus and O'Connor was around the age you cite. That's what I meant to imply in my initial post above: that I do believe her suffering and intense pain was a contributing factor in her dark world view. If you read her collected letters, there is much mention of these issues.

I was excited when I realized that one of my favorite short stories, A Good Man is Hard to Find, was going to be one of the stories under discussion this month. I've read it countless times and read it again last night to see if the story would still have the same impact even after reading it so many times. It did.

How can I explain why this story resonates with me? Could it be because in my own life and experience, I could personally cast each and every character simply based on family and acquaintances? Oh, how I recognize all the characters, right down to Red Sammy and his wife. I daresay I could even point out The Misfit if you visited me and had time for a short drive.

And sometimes I wonder too if this story appeals to me so strongly because of my own deep fears. Call it an overactive imagination if you will, but growing up in a rural area in Kentucky on the Kentucky/Tennessee border, I can tell you that there is an undercurrent here, a fear that that innocent-looking back road might not be so safe, no matter how idyllic it appears, and that violence can lurk around any corner, just waiting to be unleashed.

Maybe this is why the violence in this story doesnÂt shock me. Instead, it is part of what I admire about OÂConnorÂs writing. She is unflinching in what must be done where other writers might try to find a way to make the character escape from certain doom. In real life, doom is more likely than a last-minute reprieve.

I do not see The Misfit as the hero in this story and the grandmother as evil, yet I donÂt see The Misfit as pure evil either, as evidenced by an almost palpable regret about the outcome of their chance meeting. His embarrassment at being shirtless in front of the ladies and his willingness and almost compulsive need to converse normally as the violence escalates shows me that his conscience is still functioning. I even feel a sympathy of sorts for him at moments, such as when he states, "I call myself The Misfit because I can't make what all I done wrong fit what all I gone through in punishment" and when, in his anguish when talking about Jesus raising the dead, he says that if he could have been there to see Jesus do this, maybe he wouldnÂt be like he is.

Sure, the grandmother was flawed, to say the least, just like we all are. She lied, manipulated, baited, and whined to get her way, yet she still, in the last moments of her life, was reaching out to The Misfit, trying in her own way to lead him to grace and forgiveness the only way she knew how, through her personal faith and belief in Jesus.

And maybe by extending this grace, she received this grace in return, since OÂConnor says the grandmother " half sat and half lay in a puddle of blood with her legs crossed under her like a child's and her face smiling up at the cloudless sky." By offering him grace, she received redemption in return.

Maybe this is a simplistic interpretation of this story, but itÂs the one that...

ColorMe, my grandfather grew up in Southeastern Kentucky near Jellico and said it was a place and time where people would as soon shoot you as look at you. But I suspect most of the tales are holdovers from the lawlessness after the Civil War. (Although I've been looking for a retirement place in the mountains and my brother keeps directing me away from areas he says strangers are unwelcome.) The ballad novels of Sharyn McCrumb might give you a gentler view of the area. Do you know them?

I have to say that my mom and I did a road trip through Southern Georgia on the back roads a couple of years ago and I just loved it. Truly beautiful area and we had fun shopping general stores for regional foods. Met tons of friendly people.

Chris, I've read several of Sharyn McCrumb's novels and really like them.

I'm from the western third of the state, but I used to work with someone who had lived in Jellico. He said it was a beautiful area. He worked in law enforcement and from some of the things he said, I think he would agree with your grandfather's assessment of the area.

It's hard to explain why I feel such an undercurent of violence sometimes; it's probably no worse where I grew up than anywhere else. I consider that I had the most normal, boring childhood a youngster could have, with my dad being an English professor and preacher and my mother an elementary school teacher, but when I look back on it and realize how many people I knew who died violently, it gives me a jolt. One of my classmates and his brother strangled and then stabbed their mother to death in an argument over lunch money, another classmate murdered his entire family (mother, father, and sister) and then later escaped from prison and killed several others, including a man and his wife (he wanted their car), one of our neighbors and his housekeeper and her young daughter were murdered, a girl (a 14 year old) who took piano lessons from me murdered her grandmother and attempted to kill her mother, and my grandparent's closest neighbor and good friend shot and killed her husband before killing herself. All of these things happened before I was 21 years old, and that was a long, long, looooong time ago.

I guess that's why I've always been entranced with O'Connor's story and how my life experiences have colored my view. Even in the most beautiful of places, ugliness and death are inescapable and they are out there waiting.

Jeez, I just read through the last two paragraphs I wrote. I sound scarred for life, eh?

One of the reason I enjoy this forum so much is threads like these. Extracting meaning from symbolism simply isn't my strong point so reading these discussions add to my understanding of a story and give me other perspectives to ponder.

I've read this story several times over the years, and indeed think Flannery O'Connor a sharp author. I agree with her assessment of finding it hard to believe "that what is observable behavior in one section could be entirely without parallel in another" and for me, that sums up the story. Terrrible violence is always out there--everywhere-- and always has been. We escape, or meet it, simply through dumb luck. An everyman family, in trying to placate the live-in grandmother, stumbles onto horror due to a mistake. Unlike many of you, I do see the Misfit as the villain. He is a man who recognizes he has a choice, recognizes his past conduct could have been different, and I think recognizes it still could be different yet he still chooses, in a coldly premeditated fashion as opposed to passionately, to slaughter the family. If one believes the Misfit cannot choose but acts in the only way he can, which condition is more "evil?" I do like the idea of the grandmother receiving redemption in return for offering the Misfit grace as really, what else could she ultimately offer?

Another short story dealing with incomprehensible evil is Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery." I prefer O'Connor's writing but the horror in both stories speaks to the worst of human condition.

Here is a link that might be useful: The Lottery

ColorMe, I'm speechless. Yes, I can see why your worldview may be a tad different.

I don't see the Grandmother as evil or in any way bad, just as someone who isn't as good as she could be.

SPOILER FOR THE LOTTERY!!!!
Bookmom, I am unable to revisit The Lottery. I was in a high school production of it and on opening night someone actually hit the actor hard with a stone. I always feared it was me (in spite of the fact that he was one of my best friends) caught up in the moment. I probably didn't, but I still cringe over the possibility more than 30 years later.

Chris, I am sorry but your description of being afraid you had thrown the stone hard while being "caught up in the moment" made me laugh out loud. After thirty years, you are forgiven!

the short story "A Lottery" reminded me a game we used to play when I was in a boarding school.
(age twelve)
You had to fold your handkerchief in a way so that the handkerchief was shaped with a tight knot at
one estremity; then, one boy was single out and it became the "Giomo" (a Ligurian dialect word),
the Giomo jumping on one leg had to catch another boy, as soon as it catched the boy , both of them
had to run for their life back at the Giomo den , because the others player were allowed to hit their
bottom back with their knots. Once in the den the Giomo came out again, always jumping on one leg
and it coul be helped by his prisoners , called "Giumin". The game was nearly over when all the boys
were catched., but at this point, all the players (we were about 50 boys) used to line up forming a
path, and the first boy catched by the Giomo had to run along this path while the other tried to hit his
bottom back.
quite a harsh game

grelobe