A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories

by Flannery O'Connor

“You can’t indicate moral values when morality changes with what is being done, because there is no accepted basis of judgment,” she writes in an essay in Mystery and Manners.

The Christian novelist is distinguished from his pagan colleagues by recognizing sin as sin.

Either one is serious about salvation or one is not. And it is well to realize that the maximum amount of seriousness admits the maximum amount of comedy. Only if we are secure in our beliefs can we see the comical side of the universe.

O’Connor wrote in her nonfiction, “Our salvation is a drama played out with the devil, a devil who is not simply generalized evil, but an evil intelligence determined on its own supremacy,” and this story illustrates her idea that the devil is found in everyday individuals who, like the grandfather, believe themselves inherently superior to other human beings: the story illuminates the devil buried deep in the soul of the man.

The greatest lesson I have learned from the writer is not that the world is inherently unjust and indifferent to suffering, but that a person who struggles to be good needs to rage with every fiber of her being against this injustice and indifference, against the moral turpitude that allows evil to enter our souls.

A writer’s role, O’Connor also tells us, is not to be a dispassionate recorder or mirror of this injustice, but to write out of an immovable and fiery ethical core in opposition to it.

“A good man is hard to find,” Red Sammy said. “Everything is getting terrible. I remember the day you could go off and leave your screen door unlatched. Not no more.”

I call myself The Misfit,” he said, “because I can’t make what all I done wrong fit what all I gone through in punishment.”

“Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead,” The Misfit continued, “and He shouldn’t have done it. He thown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it’s nothing for you to do but thow away everything and follow Him, and if He didn’t, then it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can—by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness,” he said and his voice had become almost a snarl.

He seemed to be a young man but he had a look of composed dissatisfaction as if he understood life thoroughly.

Miss Kirby preserved her set expression and the child thought, it’s all over her head anyhow. I am a Temple of the Holy Ghost, she said to herself, and was pleased with the phrase. It made her feel as if somebody had given her a present.

She could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick.

“The day is going to come,” Mr. Head prophesied, “when you’ll find you ain’t as smart as you think you are.”

“Keep your seat,” he said in dignified tones. “The first stop is on the edge of town. The second stop is at the main railroad station.” He had come by this knowledge on his first trip when he had got off at the first stop and had had to pay a man fifteen cents to take him into the heart of town. Nelson sat back down, very pale. For the first time in his life, he understood that his grandfather was indispensable to him.

She worked at the weeds and nut grass as if they were an evil sent directly by the devil to destroy the place.

The child thought the blank sky looked as if it were pushing against the fortress wall, trying to break through.

Whenever he thought of Mrs Shortley, he felt his heart go down like an old bucket into a dry well.