Southern Gothic Critical Reading Response

Alejandro Vargas English 101
April 21, 2014
Southern Gothic Critical Reading Response Essay In “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” by Flannery O’ Connor the audience sees how an ordinary family road trip turns into a horrifying death scene. This is caused because of the genre of the story, Southern Gothic, combining some Gothic sensibilities (such as the Grotesque) along with the setting and style of the Southern United States. Themes of the Southern Gothic genre include deeply flawed, disturbing or eccentric characters, grotesque situations relating to or coming from poverty, alienation, racism, crime and violence. With a grotesque character and a reference to religion, Flannery O’ Connor adheres to the common aspects of Southern Gothic.
Out of all of the characters in “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” the one who stands out as a grotesque character, is the Misfit.
A character is considered to be grotesque if they induce both empathy and disgust. For example, “Nope, I aint a good man,” the Misfit said after a second as if he had considered her statement carefully, “but I ain’t the worst in the world neither. My daddy said I was a different breed of dog from my brothers and sisters…”(O’ Connor p.17). The Misfit at first goes against what the grandmother had told him about being a good man but then he contradicts himself by referencing his dad and how he would tell him that he was something unique and special. This basically meant that he was a good person in his own way. Since so much is going on in his mind, the Misfit is confused about everything and that is why he has trouble accepting things. Not even remembering his father could help change this man. In addition to this, the audience is disgusted with the Misfit when, “she reached out and touched him on the shoulder. The Misfit sprang back as if a snake had bitten him and shot her three times
through the chest”(O’ Connor p.22). Events prior to this scene, the audience could have assumed that the Misfit would have come to his senses and not done anything to the family. At some point it seemed as though the Misfit was having a connection with the grandmother. The touch of the grandmother could have been a sense of comfort and it could have showed the Misfit that someone cared for him, but since he had gone through so much it was difficult for him to adapt to something new. The Misfit is dealing with so many problems, so many things revolving around in his mind that he isn’t able to decide what he wants. Society had done bad things to him, so it was hard to forgive and forget. The Misfit had to continue living the life that society had chosen for him. Another aspect from the Southern Gothic genre that was targeted in this story was religion.
This is seen in the back and forths between the grandmother and the Misfit. For instance, “The grandmother noticed how thin his shoulders blades were just behind his hat because she was standing up looking down on him. ‘Do you ever pray?’ she asked… [The Misfit] shook his head….All she saw was the black hat wiggle between his shoulder blades. ‘Nome,’ he said”( O’ Connor p.18). The grandmother was the first person who drove the conversation between her and the Misfit into religious territory. It’s the first time religion comes up in the story and it is also the first inkling we get of religion on the grandmother’s part. This introduction to religion makes the grandmother’s later suggestions to pray seem superficial. Religion is an important part of the grandmother’s life and we can infer that her own values have more to do with being “decent” by society’s standards than with religion. What stands out about this is that the grandmother is standing above the Misfit and looking down on him when she begins the conversation. It’s as though she is speaking down to him. “Jesus was the only one that ever raised the dead,” the Misfit continued, “and he shouldn’t have done it. He had 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 (O’ Connor p.21). The Misfit has done a lot of thinking about Jesus and it seems as though he has taken Jesus much more seriously that the grandmother does. The Misfit is ultimately conflicting between whether or not Jesus was really god. In this quote it is seen how the Misfit thinks it’s obvious what one what should do with one’s life if god really exists, which is to follow him. If god doesn’t exist then one should just take pleasure in destruction. With everything that has happened to the Misfit, he began to lose hope in god causing him to act out of anger and kill the family. With the use of religion and a grotesque character in “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” Flannery O’ Connor is able to emphasize the aspects of a Southern Gothic. An example would be how the Misfit was the grotesque character who went through so many things in life that caused him to lose hope in God which ultimately drove him to make terrible decisions, decisions of destruction. This helped to show that this sort of style is one that employs the use of ironic events to examine the values of the American South.

Works Cited
O’Connor, Flannery. A Good Man is Hard to Find, and other Stories. New York: aaaaaHoughton Mifflin Harcourt, 1977. Print.