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A Good Man Is Hard To Find Character Analysis Essay

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A Good Man Is Hard To Find Character Analysis Essay
For this assignment, I’m going to examine the themes central to Anton Chekhov’s “The Bet” and Flannery O’Conner’s “A Good man is Hard to Find”. These stories share a common and important element that changes the characters: timely self-realization after a moment of awareness. In the following paragraphs, I will examine how the characters undergo that process and change after an ironic twist.
“The Bet” is a short story that explores the value of human life. It compares the theme of materialism to the achievement of truth, and how the process of self-realization leads to an awakening and changes in the characters. The banker is a rich and pompous man who doesn’t care giving a second thought in his unrestrained extravagance. The lawyer is a greedy man who could do anything for the sake of money. They wage a bet on the idea of death penalty and life time imprisonment. The banker puts on the line two million dollars compared to the lawyer’s fifteen-year solitary confinement. Everything we do has consequences. The banker loses his fortune and could not pay off the debt. Finally, he realizes the futility and irrationality of the bet. While he resolves to kill the lawyer, an important ironic twist happens. He finds out that the lawyer escapes before 5 hours till the end of their bet. Nevertheless, who is the real winner of the bet? Is it the banker who has the …show more content…
One can be somewhere in the middle. It is very difficult to survive in the modern society in either one of the extreme ways. Yet, I still love the ideas Chekhov presents in the story. I don’t think he is trying to tell the readers to live in an extreme way. Instead, he wants to use an exaggerated and magnified way to show us how the two opposite positions work, and route us to find the attitude to live our
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