A Good Man Is Hard to Find: Irony
“A Good Man is Hard to Find”
In the short story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find” there is irony all through the pages. It shows how you should follow your gut instinct when you think you shouldn’t go somewhere, when you know something bad is going to happen. In the story it also talks about how the grandmother wore her nice clothes in case of an accident, she wanted to look like a lady in case anything bad was to happen. The grandmother was constantly talking about the good in people, but was she a good woman? The first bit of irony the story throws at the reader is on the first page when the grandmother is talking about how she doesn’t want to go to Florida because that’s where the Misfit is headed. As the grandmother is trying to get her son Bailey to listen as she says, “The Misfit is aloose from the Federal Pen and headed toward Florida and you read here what it says he did to these people. Just you read it. I wouldn’t take my children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it. I couldn’t answer to my conscience if I did” (O’Connor 281). Now I don’t believe that the ironic twist is that the misfit was headed to Florida just like the family, I believe that the twist is that the Misfit just so happen be on the same dirt road that the grandmother asked her son Bailey to turn down later on in the story. The grandmother wanted to turn down this dirt road in Georgia because she remembered an old plantation house she had visited when she was younger. After turning down the road she then remembered that this was not the road at all, the old plantation house she had remembered was in Tennessee, not Georgia.
The second major ironic twist that stood out to me was how the grandmother wore good clothes to go on a road trip, “In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once she was a lady” (O’Connor 282). The grandmother wore a navy dress with a straw hat that had white violets on it. Indeed the grandmother was dressed like a
In the short story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find” there is irony all through the pages. It shows how you should follow your gut instinct when you think you shouldn’t go somewhere, when you know something bad is going to happen. In the story it also talks about how the grandmother wore her nice clothes in case of an accident, she wanted to look like a lady in case anything bad was to happen. The grandmother was constantly talking about the good in people, but was she a good woman? The first bit of irony the story throws at the reader is on the first page when the grandmother is talking about how she doesn’t want to go to Florida because that’s where the Misfit is headed. As the grandmother is trying to get her son Bailey to listen as she says, “The Misfit is aloose from the Federal Pen and headed toward Florida and you read here what it says he did to these people. Just you read it. I wouldn’t take my children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it. I couldn’t answer to my conscience if I did” (O’Connor 281). Now I don’t believe that the ironic twist is that the misfit was headed to Florida just like the family, I believe that the twist is that the Misfit just so happen be on the same dirt road that the grandmother asked her son Bailey to turn down later on in the story. The grandmother wanted to turn down this dirt road in Georgia because she remembered an old plantation house she had visited when she was younger. After turning down the road she then remembered that this was not the road at all, the old plantation house she had remembered was in Tennessee, not Georgia.
The second major ironic twist that stood out to me was how the grandmother wore good clothes to go on a road trip, “In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once she was a lady” (O’Connor 282). The grandmother wore a navy dress with a straw hat that had white violets on it. Indeed the grandmother was dressed like a