A good man is hard to find

Catholic Social Science Review

's "Good Country People" offers readers a chance to better understand the shortcomings of modern political theory. The story makes explicit references to the modern thinkers Malebranche and Heidegger, both of whom sever philosophy from sensual reality. Hulga embraces these thinkers' approach, but is unprepared for the con artist, Manly Pointer. Mrs. Hopewell accepts the ideas of early modernity without question, and is likewise deceived by Pointer. Mrs. Freeman, who relies on her senses, immediately recognizes deception. The story reflects O'Connor's preference for a Thomistic approach to political thought that honors the senses and cultivates contemplative habits.

In Flannery O'Connor's short story "Good Country People," both Manley Pointer and Joy/Hulga Hopewell devise false identities. Both have detached from their own individual realities in favor of existing within a construct of deception: Manley Pointer deceives others while Hulga deceives herself. This displacement and distortion of self is expressed in Hulga's choice to rename herself as well as in her physical attributes, including her prosthetic leg. Through the varying perspectives on Hulga-those of Mrs. Hopewell, Manley Pointer, and Hulga herself-the symbolic parallels of her physical and spiritual conditions are revealed, as is the affect of non-normativity (in terms of (dis)ability and (non)femininity) on her self-perception. This analysis of Flannery O'Connor's short story considers the interconnectivity between author and work while examining issues of identity in both the main character, Joy/Hulga Hopewell, and in Flannery O'Connor herself. The extensive symbolism embodied in Joy/Hulga's physical and spiritual conditions is explored through the perception of others, her perception of self, and connections to the author's own life and condition in order to more fully understand the story as an examination of both the non-normative of society and the common human experience of limitation and need.

Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 1993

In Flannery O'Connor's short story, "Revelation," a fat Wellesley student sits in a doctor's waiting room listening to her mother and the protagonist, Mrs. Turpin, sanctimoniously discuss race relations and snub "poor white trash" until she can bear no more. She goes into a wild fit beginning by throwing the book she was trying to read at Mrs. Turpin's head and ends by whispering, "Go back to hell where you came from you old wart hog." While I would not go so far as to characterize Magnolia Le Guin as a diabolical wart hog-and not only because I truly regret having to differ with Ursula K. Le Guin, whom I profoundly respect-I experienced many moments of empathy for that "raw-complexioned" "book worm" as I read A Home-Concealed Woman:

Journal of Critical Reviews, 2020

The motto of researching in literature is to try to bring a harmony in the society. Where social imbalance increases, need for literary works sustains in that community. Flannery O'Connor is a writer who stressed on faith and literature in her public speeches. She gave in her literary works what the society exactly needed. She portrayed the South America in her works to bring out the sufferings of those people. This paper tries to prove that above title is the modern American reality, with the evidence of a couple of short stories by Connor "A Good Man is Hard to Find" and "Everything That Rises Must Converge". "A Good Man is Hard to Find" is a Typical Connorial story with Mystic elements which follows southern gothic style, a style initiated by Connor. In addition to realistic elements, human psyche, violence, and religion can be found with appropriate purpose in the stories of Connor. "A Good Man is Hard to Find" story starts normally moves with some ironical elements but it gave the violent ending which the reader never expects. "Everything That Rises Must Converge" is a story of mother and son relationship of the black/white divide but ended tragically which is not expected by the Son. This paper is a study on life in the south with the reference to Connor's short stories. it is also an attempt to bring out the style of writing of Connor and the modern realistic elements in her works which are unique.

2019

A Good Man is Hard to Find is a story written by Flannery O’Connor, who is one of the most known people in American Literature of the 20th century. The exact writing date of the story is 1953. In the story there is a figure of a grandmother trying to convince her son to go a certain place instead of where the family members want to go. But her choices ruin the family, and they cause death of her son, grandchildren and daughter-in-law. Throughout the story she has uncommon behaviours that cannot be seen as normal actions. Her reactions and willings cannot belong to a mentally healthy woman. She has a different kind of morality and characteristic. Therefore, it is needed to analyse this character in terms of a psychoanalytic way. In this paper, the figure of the grandmother is clarified by utilising Freud’s Narcissistic approach. In addition to the analysis of the character in the narcissistic approach, the ironies in the story is determined in detail. The ironies occur in some opposite situations or actions. As a narcissistic person, she has a few exaggerated behaviours, creating ironies in the story. The grandmother’s manners towards the others such as Misfit, her son, etc conduct that she is a narcissistic person. So this article reveals these details about the grandmother figure and her responsible errors. After explaining what Freud’s narcissistic theory is, each part of the paper determines ironies, and examples in the story. As a final analysis, the change of the grandmother is resolved. In a nutshell, these ironies and narcissistic behaviours are connected one another in a way. Keywords: Irony, Narcissism, Ego-Libido, Freud

Journal of Ethnic American Literature, 2012

In his book, A Rhetoric of Irony, renowned narratologist Wayne Booth alerts readers of any work written in the form of dramatic monologue to the narrator's questionable creditability: "Such ironic portraits are perhaps more frequently slanted the other way around, with a character giving away more weaknesses or vices than he intends" (141). This is also a fundamental reading skill that I have tried to instill in my students. But every time when I teach Gish Jen's "Who's Irish?", neither my students, most of whom are its first -time readers, nor I, an experienced one, can resist the charm and humor of the sixtyeight-year-old Chinese immigrant who has a lot of complaints about her career-driven daughter, about her often unemployed Irish- American son-in-law, and about her unruly mixed grandchild. Our sympathy for her is so strong that most of us are willing to forgive her tyrannical approach to her granddaughter. In fact, back in the spring semester of 2003 when a student said, "The granddaughter really needs a good spanking!" many of his classmates nodded vehemently. A student from the fall semester of 2010 was especially fond of the grandma's "strong sense of her Chinese identity." She gains the student's respect because "she sticks to her principles at all cost."1 We were indignant about her daughter's banishment of her from their household to save her own marriage with "the lazy bum." We felt relieved that at the invitation of her daughter's mother-in-law, she becomes a permanent resident in her house and an honorary Irish. This heart-warming denouement surely tempts us to think that compromise and compassion might just be the best solution of generational and interracial conflicts.Deceptive simplicity indeed characterizes Jen's "Who's Irish?". Although the grandmother wins us over with her wit and feistiness, the author diminishes her narrator's reliability by subtly exposing the cracks of her seemingly plausible logic. The spell that the grandmother casts upon the reader comes undeniably from Jen's manipulations of our ambivalent relationship with our livelihood and productivity, of our unacknowledged unease with the ways the young are raised and the elderly are cared for in the industrialized America, and of our guilty pleasure in ethnocentrism and stereotyping. Without this awareness we can hardly begin to analyze the biases that the grandma's story threatens to perpetuate, including the myths of Confucian filial piety and work ethic; the cliches of miscegenation and generational degeneracy; the folkloric romantic beliefs in the intrinsic connections between ethnic groups and cultural norms.If the narrator's colorful Pidgin English and status as an immigrant who has fulfilled the American Dream add to the emotional authenticity of her grievances, her binary cognition of the crises she experiences in her interpersonal relationships renders her perspective narrow and one- dimensional. Her tendency to label certain social values and character traits as either Chinese or Irish, either Confucian or American, is demonstrated in her arbitrary definitions of such words as fierce and wild. In her mindset, anything belongs to the former categories is superior to anything that falls into the latter ones. Therefore, fierce, a word she associates with such qualities as diligence and aggressiveness that help her and her daughter achieve prosperity, is organically Chinese and good. But, wild, a stereotypical description of Irish girls that she also sees in her three -year-old granddaughter, Sophie, is bad. To get a deeper sense of the narrator's rhetorical pattern and dichotomous reasoning, let us take a look at the opening pages of the story:2In China, people say mixed children are supposed to be smart, and definitely my granddaughter Sophie is smart. But Sophie is wild, Sophie is not like my daughter Natalie, or like me. I am work hard my whole life, and fierce besides. My husband always used to say he is afraid of me, and in our restaurant, busboys and cooks all afraid of me too. …

2021

In my presentation, I will demonstrate the contrast between the pioneer of the Southern Grotesque, Flannery O’Connor, and her famous story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” with Taylor’s use of the gothic in his YA novel. O’Connor adapted her version of the gothic from her predecessors such as Shelley and Poe. But she veers away from the creation of a fantastical monster tradition of the Romantics to drive the focus of the “monstrous” to the very human but harmful behaviors of her characters. Similarly, Taylor’s narrative does away with the over-the-top fantasy of the Romantic tradition and instead chooses to set the narrative in a realistic space with relevant characters. The difference between O’Connor and Taylor is that in O’Connor’s Southern Gothic the setting is the pinnacle of her story while Taylor’s Indigeneity shines through with his humor, traditional storytelling, and orality in his narrative. Differences aside, it is clear that the motive of each text is a call for social ref...

UNIVERSITY OF CHITRAL JOURNAL OF LINGUISTICS AND LITERATURE, 2018

The aim of this paper is to describe Flannery O'Connor's stories as the repetition of a pattern that consists in, through sickness, changing good country people into good men. Therefore, sickness, in O'Connor's oeuvre, has to be described as a blessing, an idea that the writer herself would gladly approve of. To prove it, this paper takes into consideration the way O'Connor described the debilitating disease that would end up by killing her. The usual portrait critics make of O'Connor's work consists in randomly applying catchwords like South, Catholic or Grotesque. Contrarily to these critics' description, the somehow systematic approach to O'Connor's stories here proposed does not in any way serve to reduce and simplify the writer's work, but to enhance its mystery and manners. What this paper tries to demonstrate is that, through the analysis of the plot of O'Connor's short stories, we can have access to her personal theology. A theology that, although pictured so ghastly in tales full of rapes, delusions and murders, is profoundly optimistic. O'Connor's aim as a writer is, thence, to prove that redemption and revelations are only dependent of an awareness regarding our own death, an awareness only sickness, in its many forms, can bring.