A Good Man Is Hard To Find Rhetorical Analysis

Flannery O’Connor lived a short thirty-nine years and during that time published thirty-one stories and two novels, in addition to multiple reviews and essays. Despite her short ourve, O’Connor aimed to illuminate an impactful, didactic message in each of her stories, exposing truths behind the superficialities of dialogue and self-image. To achieve that message, most of her stories share a glaring continuity: They take place in the American South. O’Connor uses the culture of the American South to expose its racism and elitism; and in “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” she utilizes diction in dialogue, situational irony, and the third person limited perspective to maximize the impact of her message. “A Good Man is Hard to Find” involves, for the most part, members of a normal southern family, and by tracking their way of life, O’Connor reveals the emptiness underneath the Southern “chivalry” of the story’s protagonist, the grandmother. “A Good Man is Hard to Find” starts with a slow, steady pace that allows O’Connor to systematically unravels the grandmother’s personality and uncovers flaws that play a major role in the shocking death of the family. She opens with the short, curt line, “The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida” (495). By opening with a negative, O’Connor sheds light on the grandmother’s blunt, pessimistic, and selfish character from the very first sentence. O’Connor seems, from the very start of her short story, intent on disillusioning the reader from the myth of southern gallantry and gentility. As O’Connor does in many of her short stories, she makes her characters subjects of the American South’s racist and elitist culture. In one instance during the family road trip, the grandmother says, “Oh look at that cute little pickaninny!... Wouldn’t that make a picture now?” when she spots an African American boy (497). By imputing demeaning and insensitive …show more content…
In this case O’Connor’s clever usage of the third person limited perspective highlights the reasoning for the grandmother to hide Pitty Sing. O’Connor uses the same device to contrast that with the disrespect and neglect the grandmother holds toward the rest of her family. For example, O’Connor refers to the grandmother’s daughter-in-law only as “the children’s mother” for the most the story, a reference that mirrors the grandmother’s disregard for Bailey's wife. Similar to the way the grandmother sees the Negro boy as a tourist attraction, she sees Bailey's wife as nothing but the caretaker of her grandchildren. Additionally, the grandmother ignores the safety of her family after the car crash and instead acts injured in hopes of avoiding “Bailey’s wrath” (500). This flagrant hypocrisy that O’Connor illuminates proves to be central to her critique on the American Southern …show more content…
When the grandmother learns of the Misfit’s background as a Southern white Christian boy, she constantly repeats that the Misfit comes from “good blood” (505) and “nice people” (505). Her emphasis that the Misfit must be “a good man” (502), based only on the pretense that he doesn’t come from “common blood” (502), highlights the elitism that plagues her Southern cultural background. The grandmother’s final words, “You’re one of my own children!” (505), present the same sense of self-righteousness and, in this case, portrays her idealization of the Southern white Christian man. By portraying this idealization as a direct cause of the grandmother’s death, O’Connor exposes the blatant racism and sexism present in American Southern