A Good Man Is Hard to Find

Hindsight Bias In Flannery O’ Connors’s A Good Man is Hard to Find we are shocked by the unexpected violent end of the story. However when the story is read a second time we see that O’Conner used foreshadowing, and symbolism to give us many signs as to what was coming. Foreshadowing is strong throughout the beginning of the story. The first time it arises is in the first paragraph when the grandmother is reading about the crazed killer by the name of the Misfit who is on the run and headed to Florida. She tries to warn the family about the Misfit and “what he did to those people” (182) at first it is thought that she is only saying these things to keep the family from going to Florida, but after looking closer it is really foreshadowing what will soon happen to them. Unfortunately for the family everyone of them ignores her, except for June who says after the grandmother continues to complain “She wouldn’t stay home for a million bucks...Afraid she’d miss something. She has to go everywhere we go.” (183). The very next morning the grandmother was the very first one in the car. We see foreshadowing here as later on in the story we learn that Hiram and Bobby never bring anyone back with them, and when they take the grandmothers whole family, we see she is soon to follow because “she goes everywhere we go” (183). When the grandmother gets into the car she is wearing her Sunday best while everyone else is wearing normal clothes. Foreshadowing can be seen here as the grandmother is prepared for death. When you die, you are buried in your best clothes, in the grandmothers case this is her Sunday best. The grandmother even goes as far as to state “In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady.”(183). The grandmother here is foreshadowing her own death without knowing it. The last bit of foreshadowing is shown in the conversation between the grandmother and the misfit. The misfit says “Jesus was the only

Cited: O’Conner, Flannery. “A Good Man is Hard to Find. ”A Little Literature. Ed. Sylvan Barnet, William Burto, and William E. Cain. New York: Longman, 2007. 182-195.