A Good Man Is Hard to Find

“A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is the first story in what became Flannery O’Connor’s first collection of stories, which bears the same name, published in June 1955. O’Connor completed the first story in the collection in early 1953 after drawing connections between two news articles from the Atlanta Constitution. According to biographer Brad Gooch, one article “reported on a petty bank robber with the alias ‘The Misfit,’” and another showcased “a photograph of a tartly made-up little girl, in a tutu, incongruously mimicking Bessie Smith’s rendition of ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find’ at a talent contest” (226). Combining these two articles that O’Connor most likely found amusing, she penned the dark story sharing the same title as the Bessie Smith song. In the same year, The Avon Book of Modern Writing, edited by William Phillips and Philip Rahv, included the story. The story appeared again in 1960 in the anthology The House of Fiction. Apart from publications of the story, O’Connor selected “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” multiple times throughout her life for readings that she gave at various universities, including the University of Chicago and the University of Minnesota. After reading “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” for the first time, O’Connor’s publisher, Robert Giroux, reflected that “this is one of the greatest short stories ever written in the United States. It’s equal to Hemingway, or Melville’s ‘Bartleby the Scrivener.’ And it absolutely put her on the map” (qtd. in Gooch 227).

Perhaps the most famous of O’Connor’s thirty-one stories, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” has received considerable attention from literary critics as well as O’Connor herself, who commented on “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” in numerous letters, essays, and interviews. She made introductory comments about the story before a reading at Hollins College, noting that the story “should elicit from [readers] a degree of pity and terror” (Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, 108), thus setting the stage for one of her most gruesome stories. The terror to which she refers perhaps stems from the Misfit, potentially the most theologically fascinating character in the story. Scholars Melita Schaum, Margaret Earley Whitt, and Bryan Giemza respectively refer to the Misfit as a representation of “the doubting mind taken to its paralyzing extreme” (12), as a character who is “Christ haunted, whose [life does] not follow ‘typical social patterns’” (10), and as “hellbound” (236). Despite the Misfit’s frightening façade, he understands major theological concepts to which O’Connor subscribes, such as that “if one rejects the divinity of Christ, nothing but ‘meanness’ remains,” and as a result, he admits that “there is no pleasure, or at least no passion, in evil acts” (236). Therefore, O’Connor paints the central character in her most famous story as one who is both strikingly theological and evil, demonstrating an utter conflict of character.

The Misfit’s internal conflict surrounds his inability to commit to faith in Christ. He believes in a moral dilemma where people must either have complete faith in Christ or rejection of Christ. The Misfit demonstrates his understanding of this view when he tells the grandmother that Jesus “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” (“Good Man,” 132). Recognizing matters of faith as unambiguous and absolute, the Misfit chooses to be wholly against faith in Jesus. However, the Bible supports the idea of complete commitment to Christian faith that the Misfit understands but rejects. For example, Hebrews 11:6 explains that “it is impossible to please God without faith. Anyone who wants to come to him must believe that God exists and that he rewards those who sincerely seek him” (NLT), while 1 Peter 1:7 adds that “when your faith remains strong through many trials, it will bring you much praise and glory and honor” (NLT). Similarly, Jesus emphasizes true commitment to faith by instructing that “‘if any of you wants to be my follower, you must give up your own way, take up your cross, and follow me. If you try to hang on to your life, you will lose it’” (Matt. 16.24 NLT). The Misfit’s understanding of the need for complete alignment to Christian principles creates the foundation of his internal conflict. As scholar Robert Brinkmeyer explains, the Misfit “possesses a burning awareness of the fundamentalist imperative to commit oneself for or against Christ” (33), and the Misfit’s life is “in utter disarray because he cannot finally bring himself to believe in Christ” (33-34). Therefore, the Misfit’s constant conflict over full commitment to Christ creates in himself the violent character of a killer that he describes to the grandmother.

Further defining his conflict, the Misfit closely parallels Thomas from the Gospel of John. The Misfit miserably insists to the grandmother that “‘it ain’t right I wasn’t there because if I had of been there I would of known. Listen lady,’ he said in a high voice, ‘if I had of been there I would of known and I wouldn’t be like I am now’” (“Good Man,” 132). The Misfit concludes that he cannot completely believe in Jesus because he never saw Jesus raise himself or anyone else from the dead, similar to the disciple Thomas, who, when the other disciples claim they have seen the resurrected Jesus, says, doubting, “I won’t believe it unless I see the nail wounds in his hands, put my fingers into them, and place my hand into the wound in his side” (John 20.25 NLT). Even though Jesus condemns Thomas for his lack of faith, saying, “You believe because you have seen me. Blessed are those who believe without seeing me” (John 20.29 NLT), the Misfit cannot overcome his need for proof before believing in Jesus, which exaggerates his internal conflict because he will never acquire proof. Ultimately, the Bible defines faith as “the reality of what we hope for; it is the evidence of things we cannot see” (Heb. 11.1 NLT). Building off of scholar John Desmond’s statement that “O’Connor likens [the Misfit] to the apostle Thomas” (132), Schaum concludes that the Misfit’s inability “to believe in Christ because he ‘wasn’t there’ to see” results from his being “a sinister literalist” (12). Brinkmeyer further resolves that “the Misfit has let his faith fall prey to the reasonings and literalism of the rational mind” (160) so that, “unable to open himself to Christ, he has closed himself off from him and has embraced a life that is completely without him – a life of waste and destruction” (34). Despite the Misfit’s deep theological understanding, he ignores faith as the key to committing to Christ, his complete lack of faith therefore leaving him to a life of evil and theological turmoil.

Juxtaposing the grandmother and the Misfit accentuates the Misfit’s internal conflict over faith and simultaneously reveals O’Connor’s purpose in warning readers against complacent, perfunctory faith. The grandmother, more concerned with maintaining her appearance as a well-dressed southern lady, reveals an elementary understanding of Christian theology and faith. For example, upon first meeting the Misfit, the grandmother repeatedly makes the mistake of telling him, “I know you’re a good man. [...] I know you’re a good man at heart. [...] I just know you’re a good man” (“Good Man,” 127-28). Contrary to the Bible, when a man on the road to Jerusalem calls Jesus “Good Teacher,” Jesus replies by asking, “Why do you call me good?” and stating, “Only God is truly good” (Mark 10.18 NLT), thus revealing the Bible’s stance that no one is undoubtedly good. The grandmother eventually gains the Misfit’s theological confidence in her by claiming that “‘if you would pray,’ the old lady said, ‘Jesus would help you.’ ‘That’s right,’ the Misfit said” (“Good Man,” 130). However, the grandmother destroys this confidence and ultimately seals her fate when, in the midst of the Misfit’s misery and distress, she dramatically contradicts Biblical teaching by saying, “Maybe [Jesus] didn’t raise the dead” (132). The Bible confirms Jesus as the only being who can raise the dead through his raising of Lazarus in the Gospel of John (11.1-44) and of a widow’s son in the Gospel of Luke (7.11-17). However, the Bible best confirms Jesus’ power when the disciple Peter raises Tabitha from the dead after he “knelt down and prayed” (Acts 9.40 ESV) to Jesus. The ESV Study Bible explains that “Peter had no supernatural power in his own words, but the Lord had showed him what he was going to do in response to Peter’s prayer” (2102), giving Peter the power to raise Tabitha from the dead.

As a result of adding to her already-elementary knowledge of theology by maintaining that Jesus did not raise people from the dead, the grandmother guarantees her own death, and shortly thereafter, the Misfit kills her. Whitt reflects that while “the grandmother’s words of conversation offer wisdom and hope, [...] they emanate from a source that does not grasp the deep significance of their meaning,” thus emphasizing the grandmother’s lack of faith that condemns her (46). Scholar Ralph C. Wood characterizes the grandmother’s lack of theological knowledge as the key to creating the juxtaposition between herself and the Misfit, explaining that the Misfit, “unlike [the grandmother], has wrestled hard with the God of the gospel. His unbelief is as thoughtful as her piety is unreflective” (41). Therefore, the grandmother’s lack of spiritual knowledge repulses the contemplative and struggling Misfit, resulting in the assurance of his murdering the grandmother. Ultimately, using the stark differences between the Misfit’s and the grandmother’s levels of theological understanding, O’Connor conveys her beliefs that death results for those who lack spiritual belief and understanding, which the Misfit’s murdering of the grandmother supports.

The Misfit’s act of killing the grandmother, a fate she guarantees by denying Jesus’ power to resurrect, directly strengthens O’Connor’s message warning readers against complacent, perfunctory faith. Scholar Lorna Wiedmann describes the Misfit as “a criminal who discerns others’ weaknesses even while witnessing for Christ” (34), establishing him as a judge or redeemer-figure who holds the grandmother’s life in his hands. By confiding in the grandmother his theological concerns, the Misfit offers the grandmother the chance to save her life and prove her faith, therefore propelling her “toward Christian redemption by shattering [her life] of complacency and noncommitment” (Brinkmeyer 90). Directly before the Misfit kills the grandmother, she makes one last desperate effort to save herself when “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” (“Good Man,” 132). Here, the grandmother makes the fatal move of attempting to equalize herself and the Misfit, who, until this point, utilizes his knowledge of her elementary theological understanding to maintain distance between them. Offended by the grandmother’s efforts to equalize herself and the Misfit, “sprang back as if a snake had bitten him and shot her three times through the chest” (132). Whitt explains that the snake reference is “fraught with links to the devil from the Biblical Garden of Eden” (48), which associates the grandmother with the devil. The Misfit shooting the grandmother three times evokes “a number that O’Connor repeatedly uses to elicit the Christian Trinity” (48), thereby associating the Misfit with the Trinity. As a result, the Misfit solidifies his place as a judge or redeemer-figure over the unsatisfactory grandmother, a judge who gives the grandmother the opportunity to save her life.

Claiming that the grandmother fails to save her life as a result of her childish faith, essayist Jeanne Campbell Reesman quotes O’Connor, who states that the grandmother reveals “those qualities least dispensable in [her] personality, those qualities [she] will have to take into eternity” (49). Reesman and O’Connor point out that in death, the grandmother remains spiritually childish and therefore unredeemed. Wood asserts that the grandmother’s final attempts to reason with the Misfit do not show theological understanding but instead serve as “frenetic acts of self-protection” that ultimately result in “the Misfit kill[ing] her in cold blood with cynical clarity” (39), thereby solidifying her continued childish understanding of faith in death. As the Misfit’s frustration toward the grandmother’s inability to understand faith triggers his power as a judge, scholar W.A. Sessions describes the Misfit as a “thinking killer,” meaning one who “kills with absolute – in this case, theological – justification that dispassionate human beings generally seem to give themselves if they are to kill. Theological justification is especially necessary if thinking killers destroy the innocent or those who do not deserve to die” (19), such as the Misfit does not only to the grandmother, but the rest of her family as well. Therefore, in using his position as the judge and redeemer-figure coupled with his theological knowledge, the Misfit kills the grandmother, who maintains her childishness in her death by the way she “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” (“Good Man,” 132), her physical position in death thus indicating, as Wood explains, that the grandmother “remained as spiritually childish in death as in life” (40). Ultimately, O’Connor uses the Misfit’s purging of the grandmother for her lack of theological understanding and faith in Jesus to warn readers against their own insubstantial, perfunctory faith.

Interestingly, the entirety of the Misfit’s shocking character embodies O’Connor’s purpose for “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” in warning readers against religious complacency. Whitt articulates that O’Connor’s readers make up a “hostile audience, one that does not understand the world her way” (10), specifically in terms of the theology that greatly influences O’Connor. As a result, O’Connor explains in conversation with Betsy Fancher that “she found it necessary to make her vision appear shocking. ‘To the hard of hearing you shout and to the almost blind you draw large and startling figures’” (Magee 113). Therefore, to convey her theological themes in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” Desmond concludes that “the Misfit can be seen as O’Connor’s scourge, a prophetic figure who raises the question of evil and redemption by Christ to a largely unbelieving audience in stark and violent fashion” (131). Brinkmeyer adds:

The standard of judgement in [O’Connor’s] stories was not based on some pat moral such as “Do unto others” – “That can be found in any ethical culture series,” she wrote – but rather on Christ and the Incarnation. “It is the fact of the Word made flesh,” she continued. “As the Misfit said, ‘He thrown everything off balance and it’s nothing for you to do but follow Him or find some meanness.’ This is the fulcrum that lifts my particular stories.” (63)

In this way, Brinkmeyer demonstrates O’Connor’s use of the Misfit in this story to embody her theological views, which she hopes to convey to readers. However, O’Connor recognizes her secular audience as uninformed in Christian theology, therefore resulting in the Misfit’s shocking violence, which O’Connor uses to directly reach her audience.

However, apart from using the Misfit’s shocking violence to convey her theological message to secular readers, O’Connor also establishes the Misfit as a displaced person, which makes him relatable to readers, despite his violence. Betsy Fancher further summarizes her conversation with O’Connor by narrating that “if [O’Connor’s] characters often emerged as displaced persons, it was because she felt that all human beings are displaced persons standing in need of divine grace. [...] Her prophet freaks, she explained, were ‘figures of our essential displacement, images of man forced out to meet the extremes of his own nature’” (Magee 112). Using the Misfit as a relatable, displaced character, O’Connor warns readers against becoming displaced like the Misfit. Literary scholar Davis J. Leigh explains that “without faith in [Jesus’] resurrection, the Misfit finds ‘no pleasure but meanness’” (371), thus marking both O’Connor’s theological views and her overarching warning for readers against becoming like the Misfit. Desmond expands upon the severity of the Misfit as a displaced person as well as O’Connor’s warning by asserting that “the Misfit lives as neither believer nor unbeliever in the grey world of uncertainty, of desire for truth, and of longing for some transcendent meaning. Such is O’Connor’s portrait for the modern agnostic-seeker” (132). As a result, O’Connor’s portrayal of the Misfit as a displaced person separated from others because of his internal theological struggle makes him relatable to readers as well as the ideal vehicle through which O’Connor conveys religious warnings based on her Christian values.

While O’Connor’s Misfit challenges readers in their theological thinking, the Misfit may also query O’Connor’s personal faith. In his argument, Brinkmeyer first references a statement O’Connor made in a letter to Cecil Dawkins where she writes that “you must believe in order to understand, not understand in order to believe” (The Habit of Being, 370). O’Connor’s statement summarizes the essence of the Misfit’s internal struggle with complete commitment in faith. As a result, Brinkmeyer conjectures:

The Misfit’s rebellion can be seen as embodying O’Connor’s own religious doubts, a voice now freed from her control and flourishing in all its intensity. [...] The Misfit’s religious doubts, which are extensions of O’Connor’s own, are those that she must not only acknowledge but also respond to, and in the interchange learn and grow. Such dialogic encounters, as she well knew, helped make her faith deep and rich, and kept her from sliding into the easygoing and unquestioned piety that she so deplored. (161-162)

Therefore, perhaps the Misfit’s representation of O’Connor’s ideal views on faith and Christianity helps O’Connor engage in self-reflective analysis of her own faith as well as warn readers against religious inactivity. As a result, O’Connor uses her Misfit to strengthen the theological fervor that permeates her stories in addition to the personal religious vigor that underscores her writing.

Works Cited

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ByWayofBeautyDotCom. “Flannery O’Connor Reads ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find’ (1959).” YouTube, 2 May. 2013, https://youtu.be/sQT7y4L5aKU.

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O'Connor, Flannery. “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” The Complete Stories, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971, pp. 117-33.

---. The Habit of Being. Edited by Sally Fitzgerald, New York City, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979.

---. Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. Edited by Sally Fitzgerald and Robert Fitzgerald, New York City, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969.

Reesman, Jeanne Campbell. “Women, Language, and the Grotesque in Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty.” Flannery O'Connor: New Perspectives, edited by Sura P. Rath and Mary Neff Shaw, Athens, U of Georgia P, 1997, pp. 38-56.

Schaum, Melita. “‘Erasing Angel’: The Lucifer-Trickster Figure in Flannery O’Connor’s Short Fiction.” Southern Literary Journal, vol. 33, no. 1, fall 2000, pp. 1-26. MLA International Bibliography, https://doi.org/10.1353/slj.2000.0013.

Sessions, W. A. “Real Presence: Flannery O'Connor and the Saints.” Inside the Church of Flannery O'Connor: Sacrament, Sacramental, and the Sacred in Her Fiction, edited by Joanne Halleran McMullen and Jon Parrish Peede, Mercer UP, 2007, pp. 17-40.

Whitt, Margaret Earley. Understanding Flannery O'Connor. Columbia, U of South Carolina P, 1997.

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Wood, Ralph C. Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South. Grand Rapids (Michigan), W.B. Eerdmans Publ., 2005.