The grandmother's character arc reflects the Catholic mindset of the story's author, Flannery O'Connor. Initially, the grandmother is a selfish, snobby person. She looks down on black people and glorifies the Old South. She cares about her appearance only so other people will assume she's classy and "a lady." She does not seem to care about her family, even as they are being led out into the woods to die at the hands of the Misfit's gang.
However, her encounter with the Misfit changes everything. When the Misfit first appears, he is described as a rather unattractive man in a Hawaiian shirt, hardly the epitome of class and good taste. He is a criminal. And yet when he sobs about how empty and unhappy he is, the Grandmother's soul is moved. She calls him "one of my own babies" because she realizes her connection to all other human beings. She sees herself and the Misfit as fellow sinners longing for redemption.
She dies reaching out to touch the Misfit. For the first time, she is trying to comfort someone else not so she looks good, but out of true compassion. She goes from only looking out for herself to seeing all the world as her family.
Good question. The grandmother does seem to change at the very end of the story, though it doesn't change her destiny in the story at all. Throughout the story, the Grandmother is very selfish and, frankly, annoying. She pushes everyone around, purposely antagonizing her son and his wife. The detour was her idea, though she never takes responsibility, and the situation that the family finds themselves in is because of her faulty memory. Even while her family is being systematically executed, she is still looking out for herself, trying to falter the Misfit into letting her live. The instance of change, while brief, happens after she and the Misfit question the resurrection of Jesus. Seeing his human side for the first time, she finally realizes her own selfishness and hypocrisy, and reaches for him in a moment of sympathy. That moment is her last, as he shoots her three times as a response to her action. The glimpse of change is present, but her life is taken before any indication of real, permanent change.
Her religious epiphany at the story's end provides the philosophical thrust behind the narrative. She is selfish and pushy; in fact, her desire to see a house from her childhood results in the family's death at the end of the story. She demonstrates racist behavior and she reveals a superior moral attitude.
The Misfit's explanation for his behavior provides an opportunity for the self-centered Grandmother to reflect on her beliefs in the moments before he shoots her "three times through the chest." In her final moment, the Grandmother reaches out and touches the Misfit, whispering "You're one of my own children!" The Misfit's final commentary on the Grandmother is that "she would of been a good woman ... if it...
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had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."
What might the grandmother represent in the story "A Good Man is Hard to Find" ?
The grandmother represents people who enjoy cultural privilege. She is white, and she is likely from an upper-middle class background. As such, she has a very particular stance on the past—she thinks of it as a time when things were better; it was a time when people were trustworthy and shared her values. It was a time when ladies acted like ladies (unlike her daughter-in-law, who wears slacks), and men were "good" and well-mannered, polite and polished. In fact, she even dresses up for a road trip because, just in case the family gets into an accident and she's injured or killed, she wants people who see her body to know that she was "a lady."
The grandmother is precisely the kind of person who would have judged and imprisoned the Misfit—a poor, uneducated man who can easily be scapegoated because he lacks much of the privilege the grandmother enjoys and has no one to fight for him. She might have taken one look at him, in another situation, and never once considered his humanity, his similarity to her. This is what makes her final epiphany, that they have more similarities than differences, so shocking, and it explains the Misfit's comment that "she would have been a good woman . . . if there had been someone there to shoot her every minute of her life." She wasn't actually a "good woman," ironically, for most of her life; only in her final moments were her priorities in order and only because she knew they were her final moments.
What might the grandmother represent in the story "A Good Man is Hard to Find" ?
The grandmother represents a sinner. She therefore represents all of us, as we are all sinners in need of God's grace according to O'Connor's Roman Catholic worldview.
The grandmother is the last person on earth who you would expect to be the recipient of God's grace. She is difficult, annoying, racist, classist in her pride about being a lady, xenophobic in her conversation with Sam about all the US money being sent to Europe, sneaky in bringing her cat on the trip unbeknownst to anyone, manipulative in getting her grandchildren to complain until Bailey pulls off onto the deserted road that will allegedly take them to a plantation, and ultimately, responsible for her entire family's death in not keeping her mouth shut when they flip the car (which is also her fault) and meet up with the Misfit.
Does it get any worse? It seems unlikely, and yet, at the end of the story, this is the woman who is able, through God's grace, to see the Misfit as her own child and in the second before he blows her away to love him. If God can grant this grace to the grandmother, he can grant it to anyone.
What might the grandmother represent in the story "A Good Man is Hard to Find" ?
I think that the grandmother may represent a couple of things. I first think that she represents selfishness and manipulation. She is constantly trying to selfishly manipulate her family members. She doesn't want to go to Florida. She wants to go to Tennessee. So what does she do? She tells the family all about the horrible Misfit killer that is in Florida. She says that Florida would not be good for the kids. She says that John must not have much respect for his home state and that is why he wants go to to Florida. Talk about a guilt trip.
Her selfishness is very apparent after she and the family are captured by the Misfit. Not once does she ask or beg the Misfit to spare the lives of her children and grandchildren. She only asks him to spare her life.
She is also a hypocrite. The entire story is about her trying to manipulate people. Her family, the Misfit killer, etc. While trying to manipulate people, she even lies and/or tells half truths. Yet despite those negative qualities, she claims that she is the very definition of a southern lady. Perfect looking at all time, moral, honest, virtuous, etc. She may claim all of that, but her actions prove her a hypocrite.
What happens to the grandmother in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find"?
The grandmother encounters the man she has read about, the Misfit; faced with death with him, she recognizes herself as a sinner like him, and she receives grace as she dies.
The self-righteous grandmother claims that her conscience is her guide in life; however, she is very judgmental, accusing her son Bailey of taking his children in the direction of The Misfit, and she urges the mother to "take them somewhere else so they...would be broad." Yet, she herself is hypocritical because she has been deceptive about bringing her cat on the trip, and she does not admit that she has misled her son on where the old plantation is located. But, when she eats at Red Sammy's the grandmother self-righteously bemoans that "a good man is hard to find."
It is not until she is faced with death that the grandmother receives her redeeming grace because when faced with death as she finds herself staring in the face of the Misfit, she recognizes her own sinfulness, "Why, you're one of my babies. You're one of my own children!" It is then, at the moment ofdeath as she recognizes her own sinfulness, that the mother receives grace.
In "A Good Man Is Hard To Find," what is the character change in the grandma throughout the story?
In Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find," the grandmother is the central character in the story. Though her personality does not change throughout the story, her presence does. She remains throughout the story, an opinionated old woman who is disrespected by her son and his family. However, at the beginning of the story, she takes a backseat (figuratively and literally) in the family. She doesn't say much and tries not to annoy her grown son. Though she makes small comments here and there, she knows her place.
Later, once the Misfit has the family on the side of the road in the woods, the grandmother takes a dominant role in the family since Bailey has become helpless and wordless. It is the grandmother who tries to talk her way out of the situation. She becomes voluble as she desperately tries to reason with the Misfit or convince him that he is a 'good man' and should let them go. So the real change in the grandmother occurs in her shifting role from a background character to a primary voice of the family. Because Bailey has gone from the controlling son and head of the household to a diminished person, sitting helplessly while the Misfit is about to kill them, the grandmother must step forward and take a more active role, which is a complete reversal from how readers saw her at the start of the story.
In "A Good Man is Hard to Find" by Flannery O'Connor, does the grandmother remain a static character or does she in any way change as the story goes on?
O'Connor was a Roman Catholic whose writing was deeply influenced by her Christian theology. In "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," the difficult, annoying, manipulative grandmother, as unlikely a character as any to have the experience, undergoes a transformation that leads her to a state of grace at the end of the story.
The grandmother is aware that the Misfit and his gang have just killed her son, daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. She is desperately using the currency important in her world—money and status—to try to persuade the Misfit not to kill her. She appeals to him as "good man," saying that a man like him wouldn't hurt a lady like her. None of these appeals reaches him in the least. However, when the Misfit puts on her dead son's shirt, the grandmother has a moment of extraordinary grace in which he seems to her no different from her son, and she reaches towards him with genuine compassion and love. In that moment, she cares about the man who has just killed her family, and in the next second he shoots her. There's nevertheless a flash of connection with the Misfit, as the grandmother dies in a state of love and grace, dead, but a transformed person. As the text says:
... the grandmother's head cleared for an instant. She saw the man's face twisted close to her own as if he were going to cry and she murmured, "Why you're one of my babies. You're one of my own children!" She reached out and touched him on the shoulder.
Whether this event will in any way change the Misfit, we never know.
In "A Good Man is Hard to Find" by Flannery O'Connor, does the grandmother remain a static character or does she in any way change as the story goes on?
The grandmother seems like a static character for the vast majority of the story; however, in the last paragraphs of the text, she has an epiphany that completely changes her perspective. After she and the Misfit have conversed for quite a while (as the rest of her family is murdered by his confederates in the woods), her "head cleared for an instant. She saw the man's face twisted close to her own as if he were going to cry and she murmured, 'Why you're one of my babies. You're one of my own children!" and she reaches out to touch the Misfit. He jumps back to avoid her touch and shoots her in the chest.
However, this realization that she had seems to concern the arbitrariness of the divisions she has erected in her mind. She has viewed the world from a particular status, looking down on anyone who is not of that status; thus, she would typically have looked down on the Misfit, and he realized it because of the kind of language she used when she kept telling him that he was a "good man." In this moment, with a clear head caused by the fact that she knows she's about to die, the grandmother no longer sees the differences between herself and the Misfit, but what they have in common instead. She sees him, suddenly, with compassion. Therefore, she is, in fact, a dynamic character.
How is the grandmother characterized early on in "A Good Man is Hard to Find"?
The grandmother, in the first part of the story, is characterized as having anxieties--she worries about news reports of the Misfit being on the loose and sneaks her cat into the car for the road trip because she fears he might "accidentally asphyxiate himself." However, she is anything but a scaredy-cat. She asserts herself forcefully and energetically and does what she can to get her own way, including using reports of the Misfit to try, unsuccessfully, to get the family to vacation in east Tennessee rather than Florida. Her anxieties come from her engagement with the world: she reads the newspaper, knows what's happening in the world, and cares about her cat. She is also characterized as annoying--the children treat her with disrespect, her daughter-in-law ignores her and her granddaughter characterizes her as needing to be at the center of things: "Afraid she'd miss something. She has to go everywhere we go." There's a pathos in the grandmother too, who has to tolerate a second-hand, dismissive treatment to be part of this family which tolerates her more than it embraces her.