A Good Man Is Hard To Find

Questions 1 & 2


Recognizing and understanding the concept of grotesque is important in order to fully appreciate Flannery O’ Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find
because it allows the reader to be able to interpret, as well as appreciate a different type of humor that was popular during the mid 1900’s, and also helps to make her short story more memorable for the reader.
In the southern rural areas of North America where people were mainly isolated from mainstream society they were constantly surrounded by animals and farmlands that they usually were responsible for cultivating so they tended to coalesce these objects into their stories, like when the daughter-in-law is compared to a plain cabbage with a green scarf tied around her head; she plays an insignificant role in the story, and isn’t talked about often throughout. Even the baby is depicted as having a “smooth bland” face (can be compared to a vegetable), and giving the grandmother faraway smiles (like the remote fields that they drove past) as he was being held by her.
By describing the characters with animal or vegetable characteristics it helps to make the reader have more or less compassion towards them, because it either allows or disallows the reader to develop a personal connection with a particular character. The grandmother who isn’t depicted as having any types of animal or vegetable qualities becomes the innocent and likeable protagonist, who unfortunately remembers too late that the house that she wanted to show to her family was probably in a different town. By the grandmother constantly remembering and forgetting different occurrences of her life makes her character understandable and blameless, as most of us have come into contact with an older person who has trouble with their memory.