evil in the face and comes to understand in the last moments of her life that she and the Misfit are more alike than she's ever imagined.

You could also examine the conflict in terms of plot development, locating the moment in the plot which directly leads to the climax. I would say this moment occurs when the grandmother convinces the family to take the wrong road, leading to their accident and then to the Misfit finding them. Because of her faulty memory, the family is discovered and ultimately killed.

The main conflict is the inner conflict of the grandmother, who mistakenly perceives herself as a good woman and superior to others.  For instance, she feels it incumbent upon herself to instruct her grandchildren to be "more respectful of their native states and their parents and everything else" while she then remarks upon what a "cute little pickaninny" is standing outside the door of a shack that Bailey, her son, drives past. In another example, the grandmother tells the children a story of her youth, in which she

would have done well to marry Mr. Teagarden because he was a gentleman and had bought Coca-Cola stock when it first came out and that he had died only a few years ago....

Clearly, she feels herself deserving of such a man.  In the filling station/dance hall, she talks with the proprietor, commiserating that "a good man is hard to find," implying that she is, of course, a good person herself.

However, the grandmother does admit to herself some that she is not honest.  When she wants to see the plantation house, she fabricates a story about it:

She said craftily, not telling the truth but wishing that she were, "and the story went that all the family silver was hidden in it when Sherman came through but it was never found..."

Of course, her selfishness puts the family in the predicament that they find themselves after the grandmother's cat causes Bailey to lose control of the car and the Misfit and his friends appear on the scene. And, it is only at the point of a gun that the grandmother relinquishes her hypocrisy and perceives herself as a sinner, too.

"Why, you're one of my babies! You're one of my own children"

she exclaims as the Misfit stands over her, wearing her son's Bailey's shirt. Finally, as she finds redemption, the grandmother realizes that she has not led a good life and she is not superior to others and her inner conflict is resolved.

As far as this particular story is concerned, I think it centers around themes of sin and grace. These are two of the central themes of Christian teachings: that the world is in some way fallen but that salvation is possible through God's grace (enacted in Christ's sacrifice on the cross), and in this fashion, humanity's fallen nature can be redeemed. O'Connor's story, and that of the grandmother in particular, express both of these core elements in Christian teaching.

First, as other contributors have noted, the grandmother herself is, for all her pretensions towards religiosity and respectability, vain, judgmental, prideful, and racist. When viewed within the language of Christian theology, these unpleasant attributes point towards her own fallen nature. However, as the story ends, facing death at the hands of the Misfit, she has a momentary epiphany, recognizing the essential humanity of the Misfit himself. In the process, she experiences a moment of grace. Within Christian teaching, grace and sin are intertwined with one another, and this is a vision reflected in the grandmother herself.

In addition, you can probably discuss the moral nihilism of the Misfit himself, which is itself shaped within a distinctly religious framework: for the Misfit, the continued viability of morality in and of itself comes down to the question of whether Christianity is or is not true. Either Christianity is true (in which case morality is real and ought to be followed) or Christianity is false (in which case everything collapses). This moral nihilism is thus founded within a context of Christian moral realism, and in this respect, it also has a religious dynamic should not be underestimated or ignored.

The story seems to convey the ideas that it is perfectly reasonable to question religion and that blind acceptance doesn't make a person a good one. The Misfit feels that Jesus "'thown everything off balance'" by accepting such a monumental punishment when Jesus had done nothing wrong. Now, in his own life, the Misfit has been forced to endure a massive punishment for a crime he did not commit, and he feels that it is Jesus's fault. He's been accused of murdering his father, and though "'they had the papers'" on him, he knows that his father died of the influenza. God doesn't inspire him because he blames God for his problems. The Misfit is obviously a frightening criminal, but he does demonstrate a kind of logic: that his punishment hasn't fit his crimes, and so he commits more crimes in order to make them balance. Despite his psychopathy, we likely find ourselves sympathizing with him in a way that we do not with the grandmother (who seems reprehensible in her own special way).

The grandmother seems to be a woman who would claim that she has religion, and yet she's a terrible racist who constantly judges other people and looks down on people like the Misfit when it is elitists like her who are responsible for his history. She's not a good person, despite her insistence that she is able to identify good people, and her religious belief has done nothing to make her feel more compassion or empathy for others. She may claim to be religious, but she hasn't thought through or internalized what Jesus would really want her to do.

There are three major situational ironies in "A Good Man is Hard to Find." Situational ironies occur when events in a story work out differently than characters or readers might anticipate.

In the first situational irony, the Grandmother discovers that all the defenses she has surrounded herself with to set herself apart are meaningless when she finally does meet an existential threat to her existence. For example, she makes a great deal of fuss over dressing in the hat and frock of a "lady," thinking this will gain her respect and protection. However, when she tries to appeal to the Misfit on the basis of herself as a lady and he as coming from "good" people, this has no resonance with the Misfit.

Money, which also gives her a sense of protection, is another item she offers the Misfit. The idea that he should exchange her money for her life is laughable from the outset: the Misfit knows he can take her money as soon as she is dead, and he treats her proposal with the appropriate dismissal.

A second major irony emerges from the first. It is only when all her worldly defenses are stripped away that the Grandmother can experience true salvation through the grace of God. The Grandmother is able for a split second to perceive the Misfit as her son and as a beloved child of God and so dies in a state of grace and salvation. The third irony is that the petty, manipulative, difficult Grandmother is the last person we would have imagined having this kind of epiphany or realization—and yet she does, showing that God's grace is available to anyone.

The central irony in Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find" (1953) is Bailey's mother's realization before the Misfit.

Though Bailey's mother views herself as an upstanding, virtuous Christian woman, her actions throughout the story reveal her to be selfish, foolish, and racist. In the story's climactic denouement, the murderous Misfit judges Bailey's mother; this is a reversal of typical trial scenes for here, the murderer holds power and judges the ostensibly virtuous grandmother. As Bailey's mother begs for her life, the narrator tells us,

 "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!'"

First, her head "clears," or, in other words, Bailey's mother's thinking becomes unclouded and sensible. Second, in labeling the Misfit as one of her children, she collapses the distance between herself and the Misfit and recognizes their equal moral standing.

The Misfit, however, shoots her before asserting, "She would of been a good woman...if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." This line conflicts with the story's title, for the prior focus on a "good man" has now shifted to a "good woman." With this, O'Connor uses irony to trick the reader into analyzing not the ostensibly sinful Misfit, but instead the apparently principled grandmother.

I hope this helped, and for more information, please check out the eNotes guide for this remarkable and poignant story!

O'Connor establishes the foundation of the irony very early in the story when she gives us the reason for the grandmother getting dressed up for the car ride:

In case of an accident anyone seeing the dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady.

At several points in the story, the grandmother judges people as good or bad based on her very quick assessment of how they look and behave.  For example, the first time we see the phrase "A good man is hard to find," the speaker is Red Sam at the roadside barbecue restaurant where the family is having lunch.  Just before that, however, Red Sam has described his willingness to allow some strangers to charge gas, and he asks himself the question, "Now, why did I do that?"  The grandmother's immediate response is "Because you're a good man."  She makes this assessment on the the barest of information about Red Sam, not on the basis of any meaningful knowledge about his character.

After the car crash and the Misfit and his cohorts make their appearance, and the grandmother recognizes the Misfit, his politeness, which is genuine but also calculated to put the family at ease, draws out the grandmother's assessment of the Misfit:

"Listen," the grandmother almost screamed, "I know you're a good man.  You don't look a bit like you have common blood.  I know you must come from nice people!"

Although it's quite possible that, in her desperation, she is trying to curry favor with the Misfit, the observation is also consistent with her judgment of people based on their physical appearance and outward behavior.

The great irony at this point is that the grandmother has completely mis-read the nature of the Misfit who, as we learn a short while later, is an absolute sociopath with a dash of the psychopath thrown in to the mix.

Another ironic twist occurs at the end of the story when, after talking to the Misfit about salvation and finally understanding how troubled and confused he is, the grandmother, who has been relentlessly superficial up to this point, has an epiphany and actually feels sympathy for the Misfit:

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.

This act of compassion, however, is rewarded with three bullets to the chest.  This is, perhaps, the greatest irony in the story: just when the grandmother becomes truly compassionate, finally moving past her self-absorption, she signs her own death warrant because the Misfit is not interested in compassion and understanding--his goal is survival, and the grandmother is a threat to that survival.

Key themes O'Connor explores in this story are grace and redemption. Despite a comic opening as an all-American 1950s family vacation saga, events in this tale soon turn grim. When the family car lands in a ditch on a deserted road, The Misfit, a killer on the loose, emerges with his gang. They begin killing the family members, finally leaving only the Grandmother. The Grandmother has been a flawed, annoying character since the start of the story, manipulative, racist, difficult to get along with, and more than anyone else, responsible for the family's dire predicament. Yet even this flawed woman is open to God's grace. She receives it at the point of death, when the Misfit comes out of the woods, wearing her son's shirt. Probably because he is wearing the shirt, she is able to see him as a human being, just like her son, and for a moment they connect:

His voice seemed about to crack and 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.

The Misfit shoots her, but at the point of death, the Grandmother experiences a moment of grace and redemption. By seeing the killer as her child, she has offered him love, a completely unconditional love that transcends what he deserves. In Christian terms, this ability to feel love for a person you should hate, even if only for a instant, is called grace, something understood to be from God. It redeems us in Christain theology, turning us from sinners to people of God. 

Does this moment touch the Misfit? He recoils from it as if it affected him, as if bitten by snake. But we are left uncertain about him.

O'Connor, a Catholic writer and religious person, communicates through this story that God's redeeming grace is available to anyone, even in the worst of circumstances. 

O'Connor's no-holds-barred story inspires us to question how good and evil are defined. Perhaps, in that sense, how we relate good versus evil in the story will depend on how we judge or interpret the characters' actions.

In the story, the grandmother sets herself up in her family's eyes (and ours) as a paragon of virtue. So, we must decide whether we will accept this exemplary image she flaunts before us or whether we will reject it. We are told that she refuses to go to Florida because the Misfit (a criminal) happens to be heading that way; she thinks that going to Florida will potentially expose her family to the machinations of a felon. Interestingly however, she has no qualms about deceiving her son, Bailey.

In the story, we are told that Bailey doesn't like the idea of traveling with pets; the grandmother manages to bring Pitty Sing along anyway. She hides the feline in a basket and places it under her enormous, black valise. Interestingly, she rationalizes her deception readily and still thinks of herself as a lady. To the grandmother, a lady is someone who dresses the part and entertains certain preconceived notions about life. Her definition of "good" is largely superficial.

As the story continues, we begin to realize how self-deceived, self-centered, and hypocritical the grandmother really is. She consistently lectures her family about doing the right thing. However, she readily tells her grandchildren a story with racist undertones and later concocts a flashy story to goad Bailey into making a detour. Her earlier subterfuge about Pitty Sing tempts us to doubt her elaborate story about a secret panel at the plantation house. By the time she faces death before the Misfit's gun, we are challenged to rethink our own perception of good and evil.

Although the grandmother purports to be spiritually adept, she fails to recognize true evil when she sees it. Perhaps another interpretation would be that she refuses to recognize it because she harbors a predominantly sanitized conception of good and evil. She attempts to flatter the Misfit and to play on his sympathies for a "lady." However, the Misfit is impervious to her feminine wiles. He questions the reality of God and refuses to live anything other than a hedonistic lifestyle. When the grandmother dies, she does so with poignant last words: "Why you're one of my babies. You're one of my own children!" Her words indicate her final epiphany about the universal humanity in all of us.

The Misfit kills the grandmother presumably to avoid being exposed to law enforcement. Superficial assumptions of goodness have no place in his life; he's primarily focused on survival and self-preservation. The Misfit exemplifies unmitigated evil, while the grandmother epitomizes sterile religiosity. So, how we relate good versus evil in the story largely depends on how we define "good" and "evil" in regard to the characters. Will we define the grandmother as "good" because of the way she portrays herself? Or will we define her as "evil" because she is, in many ways, as self-absorbed as the Misfit?

On the other hand, is the Misfit "evil" because he chooses to kill the grandmother and her family in cold blood? In other words, are there degrees of "evil" that O'Connor inspires us to see through the characters in her story?

One of the most important themes of this story has to do with the problems that arise when a person continues to hold on to antiquated ideas and prejudices. The narration is third-person limited omniscient (for the vast majority), focusing on the thoughts and feelings of the grandmother, an older woman who is very much attached to old-fashioned ideas about what it means to be a "lady" or to be a "good man." As a result, we learn things like her belief that she should dress prettily for the road trip so that "in case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady."

No one in her family seems to respect her or her ideas—she clashes with her son and her grandchildren throughout the story. One of the first things she says to the Misfit once she identifies him is, "'You wouldn't shoot a lady, would you?'" And she goes on to say that she knows he's "'a good man. You don't look a bit like you have common blood.'" He eventually says, "'Nome, I ain't a good man.'" At least, by the grandmother's standards he's not. If he weren't threatening her, she probably would think he is common, and it was probably people like her who put him away for a crime he didn't commit. She's only telling him he's "good" so that he won't shoot her.

After he shoots her, he tells his friends that "'She would of been a good woman . . . if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.'" Her idea of what makes a "good" person is outdated: it isn't about having good manners or being more than "common"; it's about being compassionate and kind (as she is in the moment just before she dies). Being a "lady" in the old-fashioned sense isn't really important anymore. Being the type of person who recognizes the humanity of all people, no matter how different from you they might seem, is what makes someone a "good" person. In the end, when the grandmother suddenly sees the Misfit as "'one of [her] babies,'" she has this moment of clarity, this epiphany where she sees what she and the Misfit have in common rather than how they differ, and this is the "goodness" that she develops only as a result of having a gun pointed at her.

An external conflict in the story is between the Misfit and his gang and the Grandmother and her family. When the family's car ends up in a ditch on a back road that the Grandmother mistakenly thought led to an old plantation, the Misfit feels there's no choice but to execute the family, so he does. This is, to put it mildly, not what the family had planned for as they headed out on their family vacation. The Grandmother is left to face off against the Misfit and try to plead for her life.

But a far more important conflict is the internal one the Grandmother wages. She has spent her life relying on her family, her class (being a "lady"), and her money to protect her. But in a very few moments all that is stripped away: her family is taken to the woods and shot, and she quickly realizes that her being a lady means nothing to the Misfit. She recognizes too that money has no power to buy him off. Stripped of everything, the Grandmother is shown helpless and vulnerable before death, and for the first time truly must rely on God's grace.

The Misfit too faces a deep and wrenching internal conflict: is the story of Jesus true? Is he really the son of God? If so, the Misfit is living the wrong way. If not, nothing really matters. When the Grandmother touches his shoulder for a moment and genuinely sees him as just like her son, the suggestion is that the Grandmother may also have, for an instant, touched his soul. 

There are certainly plenty that you can look for in this somewhat disturbing short story, but I will talk about the one that is introduced in the opening of the tale and refers to the conflict between the grandmother and her son, Bailey:

The grandmother didn't want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing every chance to change Bailey's mind. Bailey was the son she lived with, her only boy.

As we read on in the story it becomes evident that the grandmother is an incredibly annoying character who is determined to get her own way, using manipulation, deceit and trickery to do it without any shame. Thus she takes her cat secretly in the car with her, even though it results in an accident. She manages to get Bailey to go off the main road on a spurious trip to visit an old house. Of course, although in this conflict the grandmother always wins, it is ironic that each "triumph" she gains leads them ever closer to their deaths. For example, note that in the first paragraph, she uses the presence of the Misfit as an argument why they should not go to Florida, even though when she is successful and they go to Tennessee they go straight into his path.

So, certainly one of the major conflicts you will want to discuss in this short story is the external conflict between the grandmother and her son, Bailey. In being determined to get her own way she causes him significant annoyance and trouble, and also leads them all to their deaths.

One of the central conflicts in Flannery O’Connor’s short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find (1953)” is between the grandmother’s convenient perception of Christian grace and the demanding way in which grace actually operates. In Flannery O’Connor’s fiction, grace never comes sweetly or easily; neither can it be brought about only by rituals, such as singing Gospel songs and attending Sunday mass regularly. Grace is often terrifying and tests you beyond your imagination. “I have found that violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace,” O’Connor said of “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” She was also of the opinion that “All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.”

O’Connor’s worldview of suffering as a trigger for grace was no doubt influenced by her own devout Catholic faith and her physical difficulties. Confined to her home since the age of 27 by degenerative Lupus, forced to take heavy steroids, and suffering excruciating joint pain, she must have known something about pain as an agent for transformation. “A Good Man is Hard to Find” derives its narrative power from the juxtaposition of O’Connor’s version of grace against the sentimental, convenient piety of the grandmother.

Nowhere is this clearer than in this eerie exchange between the grandmother and the psychopath known as “The Misfit:”

"Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead," The Misfit continued, "and He shouldn't have done it. He thrown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it's nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him, and if He didn't, then it's nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can—by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness," he said and his voice had become almost a snarl. "Maybe He didn't raise the dead," the old lady mumbled, not knowing what she was saying and feeling so dizzy that she sank down in the ditch with her legs twisted under her.”

When the grandmother tells the Misfit that maybe Jesus didn’t raise the dead, she is abandoning her faith to argue the misfit out of killing her. Thus, her faith does not hold under duress or pressure. At this point, half of her family is dead, and the rest have been taken to the woods to be brutally shot. Yet, the grandmother's focus is on saving herself by trying to convince the misfit that he is a "good man" and not of "common blood."

The grandmother's use of these phrases is important because it underlines the irony of her predicament. She has always believed herself to be a good Christian lady and thought of the world as divided between good folks and bad folks. Yet her goodness is of a superfluous kind, which has little room in the story's moral universe. Although she chants “Jesus, Jesus,” and exhorts the Misfit to “Pray, pray,” her words ring spiritually hollow. Earlier, it is she who has led her family to their peril by her selfishness and lack of discretion. For instance, when she recognizes the Misfit, she reveals this to him instantly, sealing her family’s fate.

The grandmother shrieked. She scrambled to her feet and stood staring. "You're The Misfit!" she said. "I recognized you at once!" "Yes'm," the man said, smiling slightly as if he were pleased in spite of himself to be known, "but it would have been better for all of you, lady, if you hadn't of reckernized me."

In the story’s moral framework, the grandmother’s thoughtlessness and lack of concern for others are flaws as fatal as any. If this seems harsh by present-day standards, we are missing the point of much of Christian iconography. In this iconography, Jesus himself suffered terribly for humanity, making faith a heavy cross to carry.

It’s not easy to be good or open to grace, as the Misfit himself says. If you follow Jesus, you shouldn’t be deterred by suffering, since there is salvation at the end of it. And if you don’t and this life is all there is, why play by morals at all? “Nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can—by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness,” he says. Walking the path of goodness and grace is never a breezy choice, the Misfit implies, something the grandmother doesn’t realize till the very end when the conflict between the two versions of grace finally ends.

The resolution occurs in the form of the grandmother's wake-up call, which arrives seconds before the Misfit shoots her. With her entire family killed and death breathing close, the grandmother finally loses her self-centered worldview, her ego, and begins to see the Misfit as her own child. Despite this transforming grace, the grandmother still meets a violent end, but then, the point of grace is not that it saves you from physical violence or suffering—the point of grace is that it changes you.

The main conflict in this story is of the character vs. society variety. The grandmother, who is obviously an older woman, seems to clash with pretty much everyone younger than she is. The grandmother's values and beliefs are outdated, passé, and old-fashioned, and so she experiences tension with her son—Bailey—and his (frankly, horrible) children, as well as with the Misfit. She looks back at the past, and she doesn't see an era rife with prejudice; rather, she sees it as a time when people respected their elders and their so-called betters—when things were just simpler. (Of course, she does not recognize that they were simpler for her—as a white, affluent person—but not necessarily for people who weren't white or as well-off.) She makes a number of racist comments out of ignorance, which are racist and hurtful nonetheless. She also seems to respect people of a certain class, and people who share her idea of behavior that is "ladylike" and "gentlemanly." When she first meets the Misfit, she cannot see that people like him have been harmed by her values and prejudices, and so she conflicts with him as well.

In Flannery O'Connor's short story "A Good Man is Hard to Find," there are several conflicts that occur. There is a conflict between the grandmother and her son, Bailey. Tension between the two results from the grandmother moving back in with him because she is aging. Whenever she makes a suggestion, he ignores it or is against it. The rest of the family also seems to be against the grandmother.

Another conflict that occurs in the story is between the grandmother and the Misfit. Once he is talking to the family and his men are taking them off into the woods to kill them, the grandmother tries to convince him that he is a "good man." This conflict (man vs. man) of the grandmother trying to convince the Misfit that he is good and not to kill them causes the tension in the story. In the end, the Misfit kills the grandmother, which shows that he is not a good man as she tried to suggest. 

The main conflict in "A Good Man is Hard to Find" involves understanding the meaning of life. This is not apparent until near the end of the story. All along, the family--and the grandmother--put their trust in the material world. They don't appear to think at all about the spiritual plane, but to enjoy the good things of the earth, such as the chance to take a car trip and eat a meal at Big Sam's. The grandmother puts her faith in her status as a lady and in her money. She is particularly careful to present herself as a lady, including wearing a hat.

But in the end, nothing in the material world can save the family or the grandmother. She is the last one left after the Misfit and his gang come across the family on a deserted road. They take the rest of the family into the woods and shoot them. The grandmother tries to bargain for her life with her money and her status as a lady. None of that matters to the Misfit. He does, however, engage her in a conversation about Jesus. He tells the grandmother that if he could somehow know what Jesus said was true, he would live in a different way. In the meantime, he has decided life is meaningless. The meaning of life is important to him, and her death comes about from the fact he finds it meaningless.

The grandmother has a moment of grace or spiritual truth in which she sees the Misfit as her own son--she perceives him through God's eyes. She expresses this truth to him just before he kills her, touching him emotionally for an instant.

The story argues that in extreme moments, such as the grandmother faced, God's grace can break into our lives--and that is what is important. There is a spiritual plane that can touch ordinary, irritating people like the Grandmother and even hardened killers like the Misfit.

In Flannery O'Connor's short story "A Good Man is Hard to Find," several different conflicts, both internal and external, are observable.

At the start of the story, internal conflict is already in effect: the grandmother does not want to go to Florida, but her son Bailey and his children insist. Her tone and her words both communicate her dissatisfaction with this plan, but she goes along with it anyway.

Relatively mild external conflict is apparent between the grandmother and her son's family as they travel in the car towards Florida. Disagreements with the children, who are ill-mannered, and bickering appear to characterize the grandmother's relationship with most everyone she encounters. The minor conflicts are irritating but not significant, which makes the eventual conflict between the Misfit and the family that much more distressing.

Toward the end of the story, the Misfit appears and the conflict between the individual characters in the story intensifies. Suddenly, the minor conflicts and family squabbles fade away in importance as the family members lose their lives to the Misfit, for no fault of their own.

I would say that the conflict in this story is character versus society. The grandmother possesses extremely outdated ideas about what society ought to be like, and she tends to embrace an older, more traditional—that is, more racist, classist—view of the world. She talks about the good old days, when people used to behave better than they do now and when the world was a better place, but she fails to recognize that the world wasn't better for everyone, just for a privileged few, like her. Her beliefs tend to lead her into conflict with her son, Bailey; his nameless wife; their horrible children, John Wesley and June Star; and, eventually and fatefully, with the Misfit. She thinks that she knows best, though her stubborn desire to bring her cat, against her son's wishes, leads to the family's car accident and her tactless and thoughtless identification of the Misfit leads to the death of her entire family.

Flannery O’Connor’s understanding of life is reflected especially clearly in her short story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” In that story, an entire family is killed by an escaped convict, The Misfit, and his two henchmen. The Misfit can be seen as a symbol of the death that awaits all of us. In O’Connor’s view, each one of us will eventually confront The Misfit, and The Misfit will “win” such a confrontation in the sense that each one of us will die physically.  What matters to O’Connor, however, is not that each of us dies but, rather, how we live our lives and meet our inevitable deaths. Thus, the fact that the entire family dies at the end of this story is merely an exaggerated, symbolic depiction of what happens to everyone. The deaths of the family are not as tragic, when seem from O’Connor’s Christian point of view, as they might seem from a merely secular perspective.

Indeed, a good case can be made that the confrontation with death – with The Misfit – actually benefits the family in some respects.  This is clearly true in the case of Bailey and his mother, and it is especially true in the case of the grandmother in particular. Bailey and the mother re-connect emotionally, in touching ways, right before Bailey is taken off to be killed and immediately after his death. They are much closer, and show much more love for one another, right before Bailey’s death than at any earlier point in the story. Meanwhile, although the grandmother is indeed shot dead by The Misfit when she reaches out to him in pity, compassion, and love (partly because she now sees him as a kind of son), the fact that she dies does not invalidate the worth of her final gesture. In the last split second of her life, the grandmother finally and actually lives the Christian values to which she has only nominally been committed earlier. Her earlier commitment had been shallow; her final commitment is deep.  Without quite realizing what she is doing, she gives The Misfit the kind of proof of genuine, godly love that he so plaintively desires.

“A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” then, demonstrates O’Connor’s belief that life is lived most richly when it is lived in the presence of death and when it is glimpsed from an eternal perspective.  What matters is not that we all eventually die.  What matters, instead, is that we live well while we do live. For O’Connor, living “well” meant living as the Christian god wants his creatures to live – full of genuine love for him and therefore full of genuine love for one another. At the very end of the story, it is the grandmother who, although physically dead, seems to symbolize full spiritual life:

. . . the grandmother . . . half sat and half lay in a puddle of blood with her legs crossed under her like a child's and her face smiling up at the cloudless sky. [emphasis added]

In contrast, the Misfit seems troubled and defeated:

The Misfit's eyes were red-rimmed and pale and defenseless-looking.

The grandmother has finally lived, if only very briefly, a rich, meaningful, and loving life. She has finally lived her faith, and that is all that really matters to O’Connor. The Misfit, by contrast, has not yet begun to live in any kind of truly meaningful sense.

The conflict at the beginning of the story is that the grandmother does not want to go to Florida.

At the beginning of the story, the grandmother is trying to convince her son that they should not leave because there is a dangerous criminal called The Misfit on the loose.  She really just does not want to go to Florida.

The grandmother didn't want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey's mind. Bailey was the son she lived with, her only boy. 

The grandmother tells her son that she wants to go to Tennessee, but he does not listen.  They go to Florida anyway, and she brings her cat.  However, they go on the back roads. 

She said she thought it was going to be a good day for driving, neither too hot nor too cold, and she cautioned Bailey that the speed limit was fifty-five miles an hour and that the patrolmen hid themselves behind billboards and small clumps of trees and sped out after you before you had a chance to slow down. She pointed out interesting details of the scenery…

Of course, as they are in the country, driving slow, the grandmother’s cat escapes and they crash the car.  This gives them the opportunity for a new conflict.  They run into a group of criminals, including the escaped convict The Misfit that the grandmother warned them about.

Family vacations are never easy.  Ironically, the grandmother used The Misfit as a reason not to go on the trip, but she was the reason that they ran into The Misfit and his crew in the first place!  The family is killed because of her actions, while the grandmother and the Misfit have an interesting chat about faith, after which she reveals that she knows him because she is his mother—and then he murders her. This story shows that you never can tell about people.  The conversation, and the revelation, clearly have an effect on him.  There is more to the story that we do not know.

One theme deals with violence, but the violence serves a purpose. In this story, the violence is used to finally get the Grandmother to see how hateful her prejudice toward others is (another theme). It's only when the Grandmother's family has been killed that she's able to make any kind of connection with someone else and accept God's grace.

Another theme so aptly shown by the Grandmother is prejudice and intolerance toward others. She believes people of good character are bred by "good families", and she's self-righteous enough to believe she, of course, comes from a good family. This attitude gets her whole family killed as well as herself. She has spent her life concerned with only what she wanted, never thinking of what others needed. This all changes when the Misfit sticks the gun in her face.

For a more complete explanation of themes, go to the site below.

In Flannery O' Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," there are many different conflicts at play—the family is at odds with one another, the Misfit is a clear external threat to all the characters, and the grandmother experiences dilemmas with her own understanding in several instances in the book. While the external conflicts create the events of the plot, it is ultimately the internal conflict that is most central to the theme, as the grandmother's realization of her own corrupt nature is the essential climactic moment.

The external conflicts set up the grandmother's character as she sits in judgement of the other characters. She is critical of her son and of her grandchildren for being unfeeling and uncivilized; however, she doesn't realize her own hypocrisy until she is faced with the truly unfeeling and uncivilized Misfit.

The internal conflict comes to a head whenever the grandmother is alone with the Misfit toward the end of the story. The Misfit admits to her that he is how he is because he doesn't know for sure about the nature of Jesus Christ, saying,

With this, the grandmother begins to recognize that her brand of Christianity and her critical nature were complicit in creating a world in which a man like the Misfit would come to be. He felt unable to be good, unable to be enough, and since he couldn't be sure that it was worth trying to be good, he turned to evil. The grandmother verbalizes her realization in the emphatic line

The grandmother's head cleared for an instant. . . . And she murmured, "Why you're one of my babies. You're one of my own children!"

And with this, the Misfit shoots her, claiming, "She would of been a good woman . . . if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."

This line reveals that the woman's ability to finally equate herself with her fellow man is the real theme of the narrative, which in turn reveals the main conflict to be internal rather than external.

What is interesting about Flannery O'Connor is that a major part of her identity consisted of her religious belief. As a Christian, she writes a lot about grace. The way that her fiction, and this story is of course no exception, features so much brute violence is meant to highlight the way in which the spirit exists in a temporal world. As comedy devolves into extraordinary scenes of violence our impressions of this world as being just a temporary arena before our afterlife are reinforced. In particular, O'Connor's Christian beliefs causes her to write a lot about the theme of grace.

What is interesting about this story is the way in which the two central characters--the grandmother and the Misfit--are both shown to be very unpleasant characters. The grandmother is shown to be an incredibly selfish and bigoted individual, as she manipulates her son and her family to get her own way. The Misfit of course is presented as a cold, heartless killer. However, as they confront each other grace is shown to settle on them both, suggesting that even characters as sinful as these two have the potential to be changed and saved by God. The grandmother is given a kind of epiphany just before dying, where she states:

Why you're one of my babies. You're one of my own children!

The grandmother recognises the common bond of humanity that exists between her and the Misfit, and represents a moment of clarity when she sees herself and the Misfit for who they really are. She is granted this grace before she is killed. The Misfit's response at the end of the story to killing and murder has changed. Before, he said there was "no pleasure but meanness," but now, when Bobby Lee says that this killing was fun, the Misfit replies, "It's no real pleasure in life." The capacity to change because of the grace of God is present even in somebody like the Misfit.

Flannery O'Connor's religious beliefs therefore can be seen to influence her stories to a great extent, and this story is no exception. Its focus on grace and the violence inherent in life make this clear.

As with many of Flannery O'Connor's short stories, the author intermingles a realistic portrayal of people living in the southeastern part of the United States with larger questions of good and evil.

The story begins with a husband, wife, children, and their grandmother going on trip by car from Georgia to Florida. At one point in the journey, the grandmother recalls an old plantation with a secret panel, behind which a cache of the family's silver was hidden. The grandmother's story spurs the children's curiosity and so they compel their father to turn around and try to find the old house. The fact that the plantation is near Toombsboro may foreshadow that this place will soon become a scene of death for them all.

While they look for the house, they have a car accident when the grandmother's cat leaps out of its basket and lands on the father, who is driving. As the dazed family gathers outside of the car, they encounter three men, one of whom is a notorious escaped criminal named The Misfit. The grandmother recognizes the man and immediately blurts out, "You're The Misfit!"

Unfortunately, now that the criminal has been recognized, he decides to kill the entire family. He has his two comrades kill the family, while The Misfit himself kills the grandmother.

One of the main issues raised by the story is what constitutes goodness. The grandmother seems to have the notion that a person's goodness can be determined by the way they appear. If they seem to be good, then they must have some goodness in them. As soon as the grandmother realizes that The Misfit intends them harm, she tries to convince him that he is a good man. She feels sure he comes from "nice people" and she is sure he is "a good man at heart" just by looking at him. The grandmother continues to insist to The Misfit that he is a good man, but finally he declares to her that he "ain't a good man". After The Misfit kills the grandmother, he declares that she would have "been a good woman...if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." Thus, the story ends with this enigmatic statement which leaves the reader continuing to ask, "How do I know if the people I encounter are 'good' or not?"