Just as literature illuminates life, life illuminates literature, sometimes causing a shock of recognition that simultaneously verifies the author's imaginative vision and advances our comprehension of both the vision and the means employed to reveal it. A recent account in a Southern newspaper of developments in a murder trial casts such light on Flannery O'Connor's “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” a story that has proved particularly troublesome because O'Connor's statements about her intention in its violent climax enjoins an interpretation that does not appear to be supported by the logic of its own content. I refer to O'Connor's representation that at the moment of the grandmother's death at the hands of an escaped killer, when she sees him as one of her own children, she enjoys a sudden accession to divine grace, a “special kind of triumph” that seems beyond the capacity of the character as we know her in the story.¹ O'Connor's reading of the climax seems to demand a doctrinaire approach that some readers are unable to bring to the story.² The design of the story itself, moreover, suggests that its meaning is wider than that indicated by the author's own interpretation. The newspaper account referred to invites a reading of the grandmother's last words in terms of a causal relationship with broad cultural implications and overtones of universality.

The newspaper piece, featured by a large metropolitan daily, reports on the murder trial of a young man accused of the sexual-molestation slaying of an eight-year-old girl. Arrested a few days after the crime, the young man admitted his guilt; and it was the playing of his tape-recorded confession that provided the news peg for the article. The confession includes a revelation that bears a remarkable similarity to the climax of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” as may be seen in the following excerpt from the article:

[The accused] began crying as he told the investigators that he decided to kill the girl because “she said that God loves me.” Investigators returned to the comment later.

The taped conversation revealed:

Q—Do you know, Robert, why you killed her?

A—I don't know … I don't know. She just said that and I just …

Q—When she told you that Jesus loves you?

A—Yeah.

Q—You killed her? Why did that particular thing make you want to kill her?

A—Cause it ain't true.

Q—Why do you believe that?

A—God just wouldn't let things happen that happen, you know, so he don't care.³

In “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” for comparison, the grandmother, obviously terrified by the prospect of death, tries to disarm the Misfit's murderous intention by reminding him of the love and goodness of Jesus. Ironically, as in the story from life, she only activates his frustration and rage, which builds to such an intensity that when she leans toward him and claims him as one of her own, he shoots her three times through the chest.

Thus, in both the real-life story and the fictional one, the murder is precipitated by an utterance of the victim. Moreover, in both cases, it is the assurance of the love of Jesus that stirs the murderer's homicidal rage. The grandmother says, “Jesus would help,” not “Jesus loves you,” but the import of the exhortation is much the same. So is its effect. For both the young man and the Misfit the appeal to Jesus' love and care somehow presses unbearably against the very quick of their problem, and they lash out against torment. In O'Connor's story the murder does not immediately follow the grandmother's assurance of Jesus' help. There is a longer development of the Misfit's problem with Jesus, followed by the grandmother's recognition of him as one of her own children, which is the immediate cause of her murder. But the pattern of events in both stories is similar. An individual violently maladjusted in society is urged with childlike naiveté to be governed by the goodness of Jesus. Maddened by the incongruity between such a simplistic exhortation and his own experience of life, he murders the source of the exhortation.

This chain of causality puts the climax of O'Connor's story in a somewhat different light than that in which it has usually been viewed. Most significantly, it leads toward the conclusion that the grandmother's last words are more than an expression of parental love, Christian charity, and forgiveness toward the Misfit, based, as the author stated, on a recognition of their ties in the depths of the Christian mysteries. Although the degree of awareness with which the grandmother speaks the words is precisely the pivotal ambiguity in the story, what she says may be taken to mean that she is responsible for the Misfit in a causal sense. This approach to the climax indicates that there may be dimensions to the story beyond those on which the standard reading has been based.

In understanding the ending of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” the key is what to make of the grandmother. Is she the heroine, as the author apparently regarded her, or the villain, as other readers have found her?⁴ The more common view is the one sanctioned by O'Connor that, limited though she is, the grandmother is granted a moment of illumination during which she realizes the emptiness of her faith and extends to the man who is about to kill her the true love of Jesus.⁵ But this view seems to demand more sympathy than the story grants her. The author has characterized the grandmother so that it is virtually impossible to say anything unquestionably good about her. One cannot even fall back on the excuse that she means well, since most of what she means is to please herself by devious means. To be sure, she is created in the vein of comedy; her sins of self-serving seem ingratiatingly human and harmless enough. But, as O'Connor pointed out, the comedic method is this story's way of being serious.⁶ In bringing the grandmother and her world into collision with the Misfit, O'Connor seems to be implying some sinister connection between them. From the opening paragraph the journey that gives shape to the first half of the story seems to lead inevitably, fatally, to the violent confrontation that defines the second half.

Indeed, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” seems to invite the reader to hold the grandmother responsible for the Misfit. Developing this generally unexplored approach to their interrelationship does not imply that we are expected to excuse the Misfit's crimes or that they are really the grandmother's fault. Yet there is evidence of a causal link between the two characters that suggests a broad approach to the story's ambiguous ending. The author herself, in explaining how she read the story, connects the grandmother's moment of grace with her recognition “that she is responsible for this man before her.”⁷ “Responsible” can be understood in more than one way, but the meaning most strongly indicated in the story is that of causality. Thus, as Bailey is her son in a literal sense, the Misfit is one of her own children in a figurative sense: what the grandmother represents has somehow produced what the Misfit represents. We may note in passing that neither of the grandmother's “offspring”—one a nonentity, the other a violent criminal—reflects very favorably on her achievement as a parent.

In what sense, then, has the grandmother, as symbolic parent, been responsible for producing the Misfit? This is the key question posed by the story's climax, and it is a major function of the rest of the story to provide an answer.

“A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is designed in two parts, the first of which is devoted mainly to the characterization of the grandmother. The portrait that emerges has two faces: one is that of a believable old lady, very much, as O'Connor intended, like our own “grandmothers or great aunts”; the other is that of the culture of which she is so representative a figure.⁸ In the latter role, she is, in fact, something of a caricature of the South, drawn in the manner of an editorial cartoon, with its distinctive features exaggerated and mocked to make a satiric point. For one thing, she personifies the ideal of gentility, manners, and breeding inherited from the old plantation culture. Her white gloves and prim white polka-dotted navy blue dress trimmed in organdy and lace may not be as practical for automobile travel as her daughter-in-law's slacks, but at least they certify her as a Southern Lady. The grandmother also champions the Southern ideal of politeness, with its warm-hearted, well-meaning, outgoing consideration for others. Children should show respect to older people, one should be friendly and agreeable to strangers, and one should feel a tug at one's good heart at the sight of a “cute little pickaninny” too poor to have britches and other things “like we do.” Above all, she exemplifies the simplistic, uncritical religiosity for which the South is well known.

In short, the grandmother is an ironic embodiment of the South of the good old days, when people were God-fearing, genteel, courteous, hospitable, charitable, and honest—in a word, good. This is, of course, the land of the Great Southern Dream toward which, in so much of the fiction of the region, people of the South look back with exquisite and paralyzing nostalgia, the land of the old plantation culture which O'Connor evokes in the now familiar image of the great plantation house, with its tall columns across the front, its driveway lined with trees, its arbors and gardens where ladies and gentlemen lived the romance of the Old South. With fitting irony it is reminiscing about “better times” with Red Sam—the red-necked proprietor of one of those shabby filling-station cafes that seem almost to typify the rural South—that reawakens in the grandmother's mind her dream of lost paradise. And it is her desire to return to the old dream world that brings her and the culture she personifies into fatal collision with reality in the form of the Misfit.

Of course, the grandmother is far from what she thinks she is, and thus she personifies a culture whose pretensions of honorable gentility are belied by reality. C. R. Kropf has rightly seen her as another misfit, and so is the aspect of the South she personifies.⁹ The old woman is like a child who treats pets and dolls like make-believe people, wheedles and lies to get her way, uses baby talk (“pitty sing” for “pretty thing”), and responds to taunts from other children by threats of getting even. Her amusing illiteracy marks her as a good deal less than genteel. Her dress is a garish travesty of true ladylike taste. She actually enjoys the privation of the black child along the roadside because it is picturesque. In a particularly deft exposure of her pseudo-gentility the grandmother is paired with Red Sammy Butts, personification of the red-necked South, with whom she enjoys an immediate and deep-rooted rapport based on their common vernacular and identical system of values. And in the confrontation with the Misfit, O'Connor heavily underlines the superficiality of the grandmother's religion. Especially rich is the implication that her mindless repetition of the name of Jesus is very close to profanity—taking the Lord's name in vain.

Equally a misfit with reality is the grandmother's view of goodness in life. It is a particularly ironic measure of her blindness that the model of better times she holds in reverence is the plantation culture of the Great Southern Dream, which, insofar as it existed at all, fed on the life's blood of the slaves whose labor made it possible. The dream is pointedly associated with death: it is just outside of Toomsboro where the grandmother recalls the old mansion and points out the graveyard that was attached to the plantation. Thus she grieves for better times and laments that “People are certainly not nice like they used to be,” while the story ironically implies that people never were as nice as she dreams they were and that if a good man is hard to find nowadays, the reason is not far to seek. It lies somewhere in the causal chain by which, for all her ideals and dreams of goodness, the grandmother has reared nothing better than the generation symbolized by Bailey with his parrot shirt, suggesting mindless repetition of the given, and his wife with her kerchief's rabbit ears, suggesting mindless and prolific reproduction, which, in turn, has spawned the generation of ungovernable juvenile anarchy symbolized by John Wesley and June Star.

Thus Flannery O'Connor portrays the South in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” as a childish, illiterate, mendacious, garrulous, and blind old woman, a failed parent who has ruined her own offspring, with a false and destructive dream of the past and an equally false and destructive self-perception in the present. But that is not the whole story. One of the curious things about the South is the incongruity between its great courtesy and its strange proclivity to lawlessness and violence.¹⁰ This is the paradox of the South that O'Connor has portrayed in the composite formed by the grandmother and the Misfit. Incongruity, the misfit between appearance and reality, between blindness and objective perception, becomes a major motif in the story, recurring in the dream of the old plantation culture, the grandmother's self concept, even in the style of the story, where, to intensify its impact, O'Connor creates a jarring misfit between the violent horror of what takes place and the blank matter-of-fact tone in which it is narrated. This pattern, of course, culminates in the confrontation between the grandmother and the Misfit—the former an epitome of Southern gentility, the latter of callous violence.

It seems quite unhelpful to see the grandmother and the Misfit in terms of good and evil or innocence and evil. The grandmother may be a lovable well-meaning old body, she may, as O'Connor thought of her, resemble our own beloved grandmothers and great-aunts, she may even indicate the tolerant affection with which O'Connor regarded the South; but the story holds her responsible for a substantial share of the disorder it portrays. The apparent triviality of her misdeeds is another misfit, for both literally and figuratively they lead inexorably to the far from trivial derangement of the Misfit. Conversely, the Misfit is a cold-blooded killer, yet we are drawn to sympathize with his tormented inability to reconcile himself to the profound incongruities of the world in which he is trapped. In its effaced point of view the story seems to withhold judgment and merely extend an invitation to see and understand.¹¹

Clearly the Misfit sees the phenomena of existence more objectively than the grandmother. Indeed, in his insistence on the plain truth against a more pleasing rearrangement of reality he has something of Huckleberry Finn's uncompromising eye. Huck is unable to see anything but a Sunday school picnic in Tom Sawyer's Arab caravan. Similarly, the Misfit calls the grandmother back to reality when she begins to embellish her story of the accident—the car rolled over not twice, as she says, but “Oncet. … We seen it happen.” Thus in its ironic exposure of the grandmother's idealizing vision “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” repeats Mark Twain's attack on the South for its worship of style, its willful blindness to the unpleasant reality beneath the decorative surface. Limited though they are, both Huck and the Misfit see this mismatch and neither can bear it. Huck lights out for the Territory. The Misfit tries to annihilate it.

O'Connor creates the Misfit around a keen existential vision of life. He perceives the tenuousness of faith and the crucial difference between a divinely ordered world and one with no transcendent governing principle beyond natural law. Unable to believe in the former, he finds himself in a world of radical freedom where all possibilities are open—“You can do one thing or you can do another”—because there is no moral order to invoke. He is imprisoned in a web of necessity from which he cannot extricate himself; no matter what he does, he comes to the same fate. He feels himself inexplicably and undeservedly punished; whatever he does he is still condemned to the same prison of incertitude and suffering. Indeed, whether guilty or innocent, he is on death row, facing capital punishment. Like Meursault in Camus's The Stranger, the Misfit has committed crime, but in the radical indecipherability of the world the sequence of moral logic linking deed, guilt, and punishment has come undone for both men. As the Misfit says, “I can't make what all I done wrong fit what all I gone through in punishment.” In a marvelous image of his existential extremity O'Connor shows the Misfit's eyes, without his glasses, as “red-rimmed and pale and defenseless-looking.”

The Misfit is defenseless because he has no way of accommodating the apparent meaninglessness of existence: no faith to assure him of the divine purpose behind the wall of appearances, no capacity to transform what is into what one would like it to be. The problem is that the grandmother's shallow view of goodness is nothing less than the institutionalized mind of the culture. Thus the Misfit's human yearnings to live and be free are doubly denied: by his fatal entrapment in necessity and by his subjugation to a view of existence that is enforced upon him with all the authority of society even though it does not fit visible reality and is belied by the lives of those who judge him by it.

It is the Misfit's violent exasperation at the incongruity between what he has experienced and seen with his own eyes and the whole cultural edifice of Jesus-centered goodness, established with all the weight of law and custom, that is replicated by the real-life story behind the newspaper article with which this discussion began. (I am, of course, both taking the article at face value and reading between the lines.) When the girl invokes the love of Jesus, the young man is confronted with the misfit between his own experience of life—a life tormented by socially abhorrent, perverted sexual cravings—and all that her words imply of the lifting of human burdens, the assurance of understanding, acceptance, and pardon, the ideal of spiritual goodness and sexless purity, and the sheer societal and legal weight of Jesus on his life. Deranged by the incongruity, he savagely strangles and stabs her to death. As the Misfit tries to explain to the grandmother the profound existential complexity of his life, she presses on him the help of Jesus as the solution to all his troubles. This scene, subtly probing the mechanism of the Misfit's violence, is surely one of O'Connor's finest things. Eloquently emblematic of his entire life, it dramatizes his compulsion to justify the truthfulness of his existence against the demonstrable falsehood that stifles him and the mechanical prattling about Jesus and goodness that is the only response he ever gets. The Misfit feels himself drawn again into the futile confrontation between the truth of his own experience and the blank wall of the “Authorities” that has been the bane of his life (the capitalization of the term suggests its proper thematic weight). The story deftly plants evidence that his problem began early in life. Some readers are taken in by O'Connor's indirection and assume that the Misfit really did kill his father. But he is a truthful man, and if it were possible to enter the world of the story, we would find his father buried in Mount Hopewell Baptist churchyard a victim of “the epidemic flu.” The Misfit has merely overheard psychoanalytical talk by the penitentiary “head doctor,” who undoubtedly diagnosed his homicidal tendency as a displacement of the primal revolt against parental authority. When the Misfit acknowledges that his parents were good people, evidently in the grandmother's sense of goodness, we understand that his trouble began in childhood with the rigid imposition of the ideal of goodness that the story ironically undercuts. Now, as the grandmother, deaf to his plea for understanding, reminds him of Jesus, he sees her as the blank wall of Authority, as yet another manifestation of the institutionalized standard of Jesus-centered goodness that has plagued his entire life.

Thus the story builds to its explosive climax. Pounding the ground in agitation, his voice about to crack, the Misfit hurls his life's truth against the grandmother's terrified vacuity. Then “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 murmured, ‘Why you're one of my babies. You're one of my own children!’ She reached out and touched him on the shoulder.” At this, the Misfit kills her.

With authorial prompting most critics have accepted the grandmother's moment of clarity as her accession to grace. As Dowell puts it, “she suddenly realizes that her superficial commitment to good has been meaningless because she lives without faith, that is to say without Christ.”¹² It may be rash to resist the authorial view of the story; nevertheless, that is claiming a good deal for the grandmother as we know her in the story, a demurral that is based on literary, not theological, grounds. As she is characterized, the grandmother may be capable of some insight into her shortcomings, but she has not been presented as a person whose realization would take a religious form at all, certainly not one so devoutly pat.

If the grandmother's role in the climax remains enigmatic, the Misfit's is less so. He sees in the old woman the mentality behind the blank wall of Authority, the simplistic, unreasoning mind of the culture that all his life has judged him by an ideal standard that fits no one. When the grandmother claims him as her own offspring, he sees what she represents as the embodiment of falsehood. At the same time he hears her self-servingly try to get him to accept adoption into her family of goodness, represented so ironically in Bailey, his wife, and his bratty children. Her touch on his shoulder suggests several meanings. It is reminiscent of the royal touch of healing, but ironically it reminds the Misfit of the way Authority has poisoned his life. It is the conferral of a parental blessing, but the implication of the grandmother's causal responsibility for his misfit, together with the presumption that he is one of hers, like all the Baileys of the world, is more than he can bear. Best of all, since the touch is on his shoulder, it suggests the ceremonial dubbing of knighthood that recognizes the squire as worthy representative of Christian chivalry and sends him forth to champion its ideal of gentility, justice, and goodness in the world. Small wonder the Misfit finds the touch venomous and shoots the grandmother to death.

But how are we to take the grandmother? O'Connor grants her a dim awareness of her manipulation of reality in “not telling the truth but wishing she were.” She is capable of sympathetic concern for animals, pickaninnies, and adults—as when she volunteers to spell Bailey's wife in tending the baby during the long hours on the road. Thus, although the story does not prepare for her to realize the inadequacy of her hazy superficial religion or to sense even dimly the way in which the institutionalized falsehood she personifies has spawned the Misfit, it does prepare for her to feel sympathy for his hurt. She does not understand a word of his life's truth, but when she sees him about to cry, his real suffering touches her almost instinctive springs of sympathy and human kinship.

This may not be much, but it is enough to make the grandmother the heroine of the story. For though it is in one sense an allegory of the South, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is in a larger sense a dramatization of the human condition that chooses between two ways of responding to the patent imperfections and misfits that constitute reality. The grandmother is a caricature of the South, but in the way that her every impulse is tainted by instinctive, unconscious egoism, she is also a droll personification of human nature as we have come to understand it in the wake of Darwin and Freud; she is, then, Reality. Thus, in a final instance of the misfit motif, the Misfit cannot accommodate himself to reality; and that way lies madness. His response to the inevitable failure of human beings to live up to their ideal of goodness is to kill them, thus purifying the world of falsehood to make it good. Since every action of the grandmother, however well intentioned, would, as the story shows, be tainted every moment of her life with the unconscious egoism inherent in human nature, “She would've been a good woman,” in the Misfit's terms, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” This is both a brutal and unworkable response to reality since it means that he will have to kill everyone who shows the grandmother's imperfection—that is, everyone. As the story indicates, he has made an energetic beginning.

The grandmother, simple-minded though she is, makes a more constructive response than the misfit. She is able to extend to radically imperfect humanity the touch of sympathy and acknowledgment of kinship in weakness and sorrow that may be the best hope for ameliorating the human lot. All this can, of course, be cast in the religious terms of a fallen world, sin, faith, and grace, but it can also be read with no sacrifice of resonance as the dramatization of one of the basic themes of modern literature. Thus the grandmother is approved for her gesture of sympathy for the scabrous Misfit as the mariner is redeemed when he learns to love the slimy creatures of the deep, as Conrad's Axel Heyst is taught to put his faith in life in spite of its imperfection, and as Forster's characters learn the one lesson that may ameliorate the disjunctions of modern reality—“only connect.”

Notes

1. Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1961), p. 11.

2. See, for example, William S. Doxey, “A Dissenting Opinion of Flannery O'Connor's ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find,’” Studies in Short Fiction, 10 (Spring 1973), 199-204.

3. James Chisum, “‘God Loves You’ Spurred Killing, Coe Tape Says,” The Commercial Appeal (Memphis, Tenn.), 20 Feb. 1981, Sec. 1, p. 1, col. 1.

4. See O'Connor, Mystery and Manners, p. 110.

5. See, for example, Bob Dowell, “The Moment of Grace in the Fiction of Flannery O'Connor,” College English, 27 (December 1965), 236; Leon V. Driskell and Joan T. Brittain, The Eternal Crossroads: The Art of Flannery O'Connor (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1971), p. 70; Carter W. Martin, The True Country: Themes in the Fiction of Flannery O'Connor (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1969), pp. 134-135.

6. Mystery and Manners, p. 108.

7. Mystery and Manners, p. 111.

8. Mystery and Manners, p. 110.

9. “Theme and Setting in ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” Renascence, 24 (Summer 1972), 180.

10. I do not mean to imply that the South is worse than other regions of the country, merely that it is different. If other regions have been equally violent, they have not been so polite.

11. In the Misfit's sardonic eulogium over the grandmother's corpse O'Connor also, with great imaginative richness, brings to culmination his keen existential vision of life. For the existentialist the encounter with death humanizes the individual, turning him back to life with an awakened sense of concern and responsibility. The grandmother would have been a good woman, therefore, if she had experienced an existential awareness of death “every minute of her life.” “As terrible as the threat of annihilation is,” explains William V. Spanos, “for the existentialist it often becomes a paradoxically benign agent.” [A Casebook on Existentialism (N.Y.: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1966), p. 7.]

12. “Moment of Grace,” p. 236.