A Good Man Is Hard To Find Perspective Essay

The perspective of an individual can greatly affect the morals that a person has which is shown in Flannery ‘O Conner’s southern gothic short story A Good Man is Hard to Find. If you were to take two children and put those two into separate control rooms that had contrasting themes, or even two people that have grown up in a different country or a different side of town, from growing up in different environment the children’s actions show that their individual perspectives on the world are very distinct and cause them to have different morals, much like the grandma and The Misfit in A Good Man is Hard to Find. The grandma, as shown in the short story, has a very religious background, unlike The Misfit who is unsure of what he believes in and
even blames the idea of Jesus for the wrong doings in his life - that if He did not “raise the dead” (10) The Misfit would not have done all of the things in his life that are considered by others “wrong”. Another example of this is how the grandma has faith in the world and that good is everywhere, whereas The Misfit has a “see it to believe it” kind of attitude; this difference can alter how one can view what is right or wrong.
The grandmother does not need to see the good to believe that it is there so she believes that everyone is capable of it. Unlike the grandma, The Misfit believes that if good is not shown or given to him, achieving a wicked thing is fine and morally okay. As a result of these different perspectives from growing up so differently, the characters develop very different morals. ‘O Conner’s intent with this idea is that morals are not necessarily viewed the same way and can explain why people do things that are considered “wrong”. In this time period certain things were considered a social norm when really it was not; things that dealt with race, and gender are examples of this. The author’s intent was to explain why people thought it was okay to use discrimination and that because they were raised that way the people could not see that what they were doing is wrong. At the end of the short story when The Misfit says “It’s no real pleasure in life” (11) that is when we see the shift of morals that was happening in that time period as well; when people were starting to stand up for what they believed
in. ‘O Conner’s intent with this section was to demonstrate that there were people starting to realize what is right and wrong and that it takes some event, usually bad, to show that.