A Good Man it's Hard to Find
Uploaded by carlycaro on Nov 21, 2005
A Good Man is Hard to Find
To the inexperienced, the writing of Flannery O'Connor can seem at once cold and dispassionate, as well as almost absurdly harsh and violent. Her short stories normally end in horrendous, freak fatalities or, at the very least, a character's emotional devastation. In reality, her writing is filled with meaning and symbolism, hidden in a flawless narrative style that is not biased, dogmatic, or of personal belief. Flannery O'Connor is a Christian writer, and her work is message-oriented, yet she is far too brilliant a stylist to tip her hand. Nevertheless, she achieves what no Christian writer has ever achieved: a type of writing that stands up on both literary and the religious grounds, and succeeds in doing justice to both. Flannery O’Connor uses Christianity as a fundamental thesis in “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” The exploration for the meaning of the Christian faith in the story is based on O’Connor’s view that contemporary society was drastically changing for the worst. O’Connor, a fundamentalist and a Christian moralist focuses her powerful apocalyptic fiction on the South. O’Connor views the lifestyles of the “elite” Southern people to be a facade. “A Good man is Hard to Find” focuses on Christianity being filled with sin and punishment, good and evil, belief and unbelief (Driskel and Brittain 25).
Before trying to examine the various elements that make up the remarkable writing of Flannery O'Connor, a bit of biography is necessary. Mary Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia on March twenty-fifth, 1925 to Catholic parents Edward F. and Regina C. O'Connor, and spent her early childhood at 207 East Charlton Street. Young Flannery attended St. Vincent's Grammar School and Sacred Heart Parochial School. In 1938 her father got a position as appraiser for the Federal Housing Administration, and the family moved to North East Atlanta, then Milledgeville, where, three years later, Ed died from complications arising from the chronic autoimmune disease lupus. Flannery attended Georgia State College for Women (now Georgia College) and State University of Iowa, receiving her MFA from the latter in 1947. In 1951, after complaining of heaviness in her typing arms, she was diagnosed with the same lupus that had killed her father. She went on, despite the disease, to write two novels and thirty-two short stories, winning awards and acclaim, going on speaking tours when her health permitted, but spending most...