"A Good Man is Hard to Find": Flannery O'Connor

Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1995 by Gray R. Grund

This casebook of Flannery O'Connor's most widely discussed story is an in-depth and sensible volume in the series, Women Writers: Texts and Contexts, and includes, primarily for the undergraduate reader, an introduction by the volume editor, Frederick Asals; a brief chronology of O'Connor's life; comments and letters by the writer herself; the authoritative text of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find"; critical essays from a variety of perspectives; and a suggestive bibliography. Of immediate fascination are O'Connor's thoughts about herself as a "literalist of the imagination" and the craft she employs to suggest the presence of grace in a world decidedly graceless. Indeed, these two ideas - O'Connor's technique, especially her point of view, and the theological perspective of "A Good Man" - organize the criticism of the story that Asals collects.

Though originally published in 1953, O'Connor's story received much wider attention and acclaim after inclusion in The House of Fiction (1960), an influential anthology and by-product of New Criticism. In fact, serious criticism began with this collection, particularly because one of the editors, Caroline Gordon, it now is clear, powerfully affected O'Connor's narrative strategy, her "playing fast and loose" with point of view. William S. Doxey's essay in the present volume attests to the fury of the technical debate, arguing that the story is seriously flawed by a change in point of view from the grandmother to The Misfit.

However, critical thought has been mostly attentive to the theological framework of the story. As early as 1966 W. S. Marks took its theology for granted, reading the story as Catholic allegory, a view challenged by Michael O. Bellamy, who pushed for a more Protestant dynamic at the core of the story.

Fresher perspectives multiplied during the 1980s. J. O. Tate's "A Good Source Is Not So Hard to Find" uncovered newspaper sources for the character of The Misfit, and other studies of O'Connor's geography and local realism added healthy correctives to the religious bent of so many of the critical approaches to the story. Most interesting, perhaps, of recent perspectives is Mary Jane Schenck's study of deconstructed meaning in "A Good Man." Drawing upon the notions of Paul de Man, this article examines, as earlier studies had also, a confrontation not only between the grandmother and The Misfit, but also between a self based on self-knowledge and a self constructed from language in each of the characters.

This is a very useful casebook, judicious and wide-ranging in its selections, a very helpful volume for students of O'Connor's short fiction. The intermingling of the comic, the grotesque, and the violent finds unsettling and disquieting expression in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," and Frederick Asals's volume provides access to the ironic consequences of their interaction.

GARY R. GRUND Rhode Island College