"A Good Man Is Hard To Find."

          

           The plot of “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” surprised me; however, the foreshadowing in the first couple of pages gave me an idea of what might happen later in the story. The grandmother had introduced this dangerous man known as The Misfit, who had just escaped from the Penitentiary and is headed to Florida were Bailey and his family are going for vacation. While getting ready to depart for their vacation the grandmother made sure that she was dressed like a lady in case their was an accident and she was found dead. She wanted to make sure that whoever found her knew that he was a lady. Although I had an idea of what was going to happen in this short story from the foreshadowing, Flannery O'Connor had a twist at the end that I never saw coming. In other stories, novels, books, movies, and television shows I have read or viewed it's very rare to see the innocent get murdered and have the story end. I thought at some point in the story the grandmother was going to die, but I wasn't certain if The Misfit was going to be involved in her death. The twist at the end when The Misfit murdered Bailey, his family, and the grandmother was what I never saw coming. Having the kids and baby in the story forced me to never think that the story would end with their death. With the ending of the story being so morbid it makes the story's end more tragic.

           As I started reading this short story, the first thing I thought was that the family is going end up face to face with The Misfit at some point in there journey to Florida. The grandmother was trying to convince her son Bailey to visit east Tennessee instead of going to Florida again. She read from the local newspaper to Bailey, “Here this fellow that calls himself The Misfit is aloose from the Federal Pen and headed towards Florida and you read what it says he did to these people. I wouldn't take my children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it.”(356) I believe this was foreshadowing what was in store for the family. I knew that they were going to see The Misfit somewhere during their trip to Florida.

          Flannery O'Conner went to great detail describing the grandmother's attire the morning they were leaving for the trip. There was one major part that caught my attention during this part of the story. It was when O'Conner compared the grandmother's attire to that of the mother of Bailey's children. The author wrote, “The children's mother still had on slacks and still had her hair tied up in a green kerchief, but the grandmother had on a navy blue straw hat with a bunch of white violets on the brim and a navy blue dress a small white dot in the print.”(357) The explanation of the grandmother's attire was to illustrate that, “ In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady.”(357) Once I read this I had a feeling that the grandmother was going to die in a car accident somewhere on the highway from Georgia to Florida. Another key point in the story for me was when Bailey pulled the car off to the side of the road. His children had been yelling and kicking his seat because they wanted to go find the silver behind the secret panel in the plantation home. I truly thought Bailey was going to turn around and tell the grandmother to stop telling the children absurd stories about hidden silver in some house, and that they would continue their drive to Florida. I never thought that he would give into the children's tantrums. As they were driving along the dirt road I imagined that they would find the old plantation abandoned, destroyed, or that maybe The Misfit was hiding out in this old home.

          During the accident, as the children fell to the floor, the grandmother flew to the front seat. As well, the mother and baby were thrown from the car to the ground. My immediate thought was that this is the accident the grandmother had made sure she looked liked a lady for. I believed that she had died in the accident. The foreshadowing earlier in the story was correct about there being an accident but the grandmother had survived. After the accident the family spotted a car coming towards them. As the car came closer, they noticed there were three grown men inside. Two of the men got out of the car and walked to either side. When the third man with the gun emerged from the vehicle, I knew this had to be The Misfit. Why else would there have been three men driving out in the middle of nowhere? They had to be men that didn't want to be noticed or were hiding from something. When The Misfit asked one of the other two men he was with to check and see if the car would run I thought the family would end up stranded in the middle of the woods without a car. It wasn't until the grandmother yelled out,” You're The Misfit!...I recognized you at once.”(364) that I knew no one in the family was going to make it out of the woods alive.