O'Connor, Flannery - Gary Sloan (essay date winter 1999)
Gary Sloan (essay date winter 1999)
SOURCE: Sloan, Gary. “O'Connor's ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find.’ The Explicator 57, no. 2 (winter 1999): 118-21.
[In the following essay, Sloan challenges popular assessments of O'Connor's The Misfit and instead depicts him as a primitive and dangerous character.]
The Misfit, the bad seed in Flannery O'Connor's short story [“A Good Man is Hard to Find”], is commonly deemed a logician of no mean wit. He has been pictured as a modern Pascal who wagers wrong (Cobb), a rigorously empirical Doubting Thomas (Scouten 63), a mental “thoroughbred with a curious and active nose” (Currie 149), and an instinctive scholar plumbing reality (Jones 837). Other critics describe him as a rationalist who “has to know ‘why’” (Feeley 75), a thinker “recalling age-old debates about theodicy” (Johansen 38), as possessing “credibility and authority” (Orvell 132), “a scholarly awareness of...
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