they talk about the escaped murderer, the Misfit. The consensus of this conversation is that no one can be trusted and the the world has become a more violent place. The children are not respectful but really every character, with the exception of Sammy perhaps, is only interested in selfish needs.

After killing the grandmother, the Misfit says she may have been a good woman if someone had been there to shoot her every day of her life. What he means is that the world is so off balance that it takes these extreme situations to prompt people into behaving unselfishly. If everyone is selfish and untrustworthy, maybe the only thing that would make them appreciate life and others would be to constantly face death. It has been a subject of debate whether or not the grandmother actually achieves grace when she says the Misfit is "one of her children" or if this was also a last ditch effort to save her own life. This ambiguity shows that a good woman is also hard to find. In fact, it is interesting to consider if O'Connor may have intended this ambiguity.

O’Connor lets us know whose story this is in the first two lines, “The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennesseeand she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey’s mind.” Note how the narrator immediately gives us access to information in the grandmother’s mind, more than what an outside observer would know, but  does so in the voice of an observer.  The narrator does not say “the grandmother thought that” but rather just states her thoughts. As for the meaning of the work, as the other respondent explains, this story as all of O’Connor’s work needs to be read in terms of her Christianity and the significance of original sin, which makes all people deeply flawed.  In an essay “Mystery and Manners” O’Connor states that the subject of her work is “the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil." She tries to portray in each story “an action that is totally unexpected, yet totally believable," often an act of violence, violence being "the extreme situation that best reveals what we are essentially.” Through violence she wants to evoke Christian mystery.

The title speaks the truth, or at least O'Connor's idea of it, about the characters in the story and people in general.  She believes that "a good man(or woman) is hard to find".  Each of the characters in the story is depicted harshly or somewhat negatively - they are not likeable.  O'Connor, who was a strong Roman Catholic, demonstrates in this story that humans are completely undeserving of God's grace.  The grandmother at the very end receives grace as she reaches out to the Misfit, but the changes in her only come because she is being held at gunpoint about to die.

The story is written in the third person - with the grandmother's thoughts and perspective being prominent. 

When discussing a piece of fiction, it is always tricky to speculate about an author's point of view. We generally want to maintain some distance between the author and the narrator, even if the narrator resembles the author or shares his or her same views. It becomes even more difficult to determine an author's point of view in a third-person story like Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." In a story written in the third-person point of view, the narrator is not a participant in the events of the story like the narrator of a first-person story. Rather, the narrator is a kind of disembodied intelligence hovering over the story, relaying the events that occur to the reader without necessarily coloring them with his or her own viewpoint.

This is not to say, though, that the narration is completely objective. "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" is written in the third-person limited point of view, which means that the reader is only given direct access to the thoughts and feelings of one character. In this case, that character is the grandmother, and we see this in the very first sentence of the story: "The grandmother didn't want to go to Florida." Notice the verb "want;" it's a mental verb. The narrator would only be able to give us this information if they were able to eavesdrop, as it were, on the grandmother's thoughts. We are not privy to this information about any of the other characters. We can infer what they think through their actions, but we do not get direct access to any of their thoughts or feelings.

Third person limited point of view is similar in a lot of ways to first person, since in both we only get direct access to one character's interior life. The big difference between these points of view, though, is the element of voluntary admission. A first-person narrator volunteers their thoughts and feelings to the reader; a third-person narrator relays information that the character may not want to reveal. This is important for the grandmother because she puts a lot of stock in appearances, surfaces. She carefully cultivates her own appearance to manage others' impressions of her. This comes through early in the story when the grandmother privately chides her daughter-in-law for her untidy appearance: "The children's mother still had on slacks and still had her head tied up in a green kerchief." This she contrasts with her own very neat, tasteful ensemble. She concludes, "In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady." A "lady" usually suggests qualities of character—poise, courtesy, refinement. The grandmother does not have any of these qualities, only the appearance of one who would.

During the car trip to find an old planation house, the grandmother realizes she has given her son the wrong directions, and the realization of this startles her so much that it eventuates in the car rolling into a ditch on the side of the road. Once the dust settles, the narrator reveals this to the reader: "The horrible thought she had had before the accident was that the house she had remembered so vividly was not in Georgia but in Tennessee." This is not a detail she would voluntarily share with the reader. It would make her look bad, which is something she would absolutely not allow. The narrator does not care, though, and reveals this piece of information to us anyway. The narrator's commitment is not to the grandmother's vanity but to ruthless honesty.

For the majority of the story, this commitment to honesty serves to cut through the grandmother's pretentions, and what we see is not flattering. But at the end of the story, the narrator's honesty provides an unexpected moment of redemption. After the other members of the family have been killed, the grandmother tries every sort of manipulation she can think of to get the Misfit to spare her: "You've got good blood! I know you wouldn't shoot a lady! I know you come from nice people! Pray! Jesus, you ought not to shoot a lady. I'll give you all the money I've got!" Just after this, though, she says something peculiar to him: "Why you're one of my babies. You're one of my own children!" It is a moment of recognition, the most genuinely human gesture we see from her in the entire story. We know that this is not just another manipulative gambit because the narrator tells us this: "the grandmother's head cleared for an instant." If the narrator has been so honest about the grandmother's shortcomings earlier in the story, the reader can trust that this epiphany is genuine as well.

To what extent does the narrator of this story communicate O'Connor's personal view of the grandmother? It is impossible to say. The narrator does, however, provide an honest view of a character who is not honest about herself.