Epiphany In A Good Man Is Hard To Find

Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find takes us on the journey of unlikely receivers of redemptive grace. The story follows Grandmother and her family on a road expedition to their approaching fate carried out by the Misfit and his associated convicts. Flannery O’Connor presents exaggerations in her characters to demonstrate their depraved sense of character. The main theme is acknowledged through a last moment epiphany towards the end of the story. Flannery O’Conner sets the reader up with a surprising new point of view on the morals and religion explored in the characters, the Grandmother and the Misfit. The narrator begins the story with the Grandmother and the rest of her family, Bailey (her son), his wife, June Star and John Wesley, their children, and the baby setting out on a road trip. She worries about serial killer named the Misfit who has …show more content…
Neither of whom particularly deserving, both the Grandmother and the Misfit receive Grace from God. As she realizing her family is execute by the gunshots nearby the forest, the Grandmother pleads the Misfit to pray so that Jesus will help him. Before the Misfit executes her, the Grandmother identifies him as one of her own children, recognizing him as a fellow human capable of being saved by God's Grace. She attempts to touch him on the shoulder and he jumps back like a “snake had bitten him and shoot her three times in the chest” (152). The story of Jesus confronting the Devil in the desert can be compared here as the Misfit is Jesus and the Godmother is the Devil. The Misfit manages to resist the temptation s of the Grandmother by shooting her in the chest three times referring to the Holy Trinity: the Father, the Son, and Holy Ghost. After he executes the last member of the ill-fated family, the Misfit is indicated to have achieved more or less level of Grace as when he says “[it is] no real pleasure in