Symbolism in A Good Man Is Hard To Find Essay

Symbolism in Flannery OConnors

A Good Man is Hard to Find

In a superficial view, Flannery OConnors A Good Man is Hard to Find is no more than a simple story of a family travelling to Florida for the vacation and facing their last moment after confronting the escaped criminal, Misfit. However, it contains numerous foreshadows that allude to the ending of the story and OConnors tremendous use of symbolism implicated in the conversations between characters at various parts of the story. It is very surprising how the author uses this symbolism and allusive descriptions to teach us a veiled lesson.

One important thing needed to catch the symbolism of this story is the understanding of characters. Grandmother, the leading character of the story, is a lady who has a South-heritage deep in her heart and admires the glorious time-honored tradition of South. In the story generally, she is portrayed as a hypocritical and self-centered person who is very faithful to the manners and customs of the traditional South. When carrying her cat, Pitty Song, with her, for instance, she justifies herself in her own way, showing her self-centered characteristics.

She also has a class consciousness and feels her own superiority of lady. This is well demonstrated in the story through her saying of Little niggers in the country dont have things like we do. If I could paint, Id paint that picture. It is clearly inferred that she classifies humans into social classes and discriminates against them. Moreover, when the family is about to depart, she is wearing a navy blue straw sailor hat with a bunch of white violets on the brim and a navy blue dress with a small white dot in the print. As a traveler, she is dressing abnormally, and it is noticeable that she is described as a traditional lady of South, representing the high social status.

In her conversation with Red Sammy, furthermore, she simply defines him as a good person just after she heard that he has let people charge the gas they bought by just looking at their appearances. Here, she tends to judge people by the way they look. This is more obviously displayed when she says I just know youre a good man. Youre not a bit common! in her meeting with the Misfit in order to evade the predicament she is facing, not exactly knowing what type of person he is. Through it, she presents a double-faced and hypocritical personality. Likewise, she uses a newspaper to persuade Bailey, gets on the car first, eats a peanut butter sandwich, and mentions Coca-Cola stock when talking about her suitor. The use of these words indicates OConnors intention to express the presence of grandmother as a hypocritical character of jamming industrial society.

Childrens mother is the other person OConnor presents to express her symbolism. She, on the contrary to the grandmother, adapts herself to the changing social phenomenon. That is, if the grandmother has a contradictory standard, the childrens mother, on the other hand, is a type of person who has lost that standard completely. She shows no identity in the story, but rather is appeared as a well-adjusting rabbit in the grass. She sleeps in the car on the way of journey without saying any words, gets extremely much hurts than any other person from the accident, and obediently accepts her death thrown to her by saying Yes, thank you, neither protesting nor trying to persuade the Misfit. This prints a grimacing portrait of this misfit world of industrialism. Despite the disparity in personalities, one common thing that can be discovered from these two characters is that they are both unnamed. In other words, this fiction is not a story of specific characters, but a story of us all.

Another important thing to understand the symbolism of this story is the use of foreshadows. In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady. At this point, it is implied that the grandmother finally ends up to her death. In addition to this, OConnor shows the shadow of forthcoming death on many sides of the story. For example, when the family passes a large cotton field with five or six graves fenced in the middle of it, like a small island, the number of graves is in accord with the number of family members, and Toombsboro, the place the family passes by, is the word addition of tombs and bury. Moreover, it is inferred that the family is approaching to their death when the hearse-like automobile was getting nearer to them.

In a story A Good Man is Hard to find, OConnor demonstrates her lesson through the magnificent use of symbolism and allusive descriptions. The two characters of opposite attitudes, the grandmother and childrens mother, create different views of industrial society symbolized in the story, and foreshadows installed sporadically suggest the shadow of forthcoming death of the family and develop the storyline very interesting.