A Good Man Is Hard to Find: Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O'Connor, one of the most prolific writers of the twentieth century, is often noted for her satirical writing style and her comically inane characters that often meet gruesome and grotesque ends. The "uninitiated" might even be tempted to consider her work a confusing and pointless portrayal of senseless violence perpetrated in large part against ignorant innocents. To do so, however, would be to do a great disservice to the genius of her work, and to deny the existence of multiple layers and levels on which her stories can be interpreted. Much of O'Connor's genius lies in her use of sometimes subtle, sometimes obvious, yet always striking imagery and symbolism. In her story A Good Man is Hard to Find, Flannery O'Connor expertly uses the images of the sun and the woods to both foreshadow and witness the action as well as to symbolize the religious and moral dilemma confronting the story's main characters.

O'Connor, who in her brief life of thirty-nine years wrote over 30 short stories and two highly acclaimed novels, repeatedly used the sun and the woods as active components of her fiction. This has led many to claim that the use of such imagery may be considered her own personal signature.
'Connor's second collection of short stories, Everything that Rises Must Converge, friend and editor Robert Fitzgerald points out that these images appear "frequently enough to be termed a signature, immediately stamping the story a Flannery O'Connor work"(xxxii). It is through these images that reader is given signals and clues not only to the action of the story, but into the mind and deeper agenda of the author.

Asals, Frederick. Flannery O'Connor: The Imagination of Extremity. The University of Georgia

The scene immediately following the car accident further supports the idea of the woods as evil, "behind the ditch they were sitting in, there were more woods, tall, dark and deep"(125). This image creates a sense of foreboding, a sense of impending doom, as if the characters were somewhat surrounded and lacking an avenue of escape. Then later, after the arrival of the Misfit, the image grows even more menacing, "behind them the line of woods gaped like a dark open mouth"(127). The likening of the woods to a "dark open mouth" effectively seals the fate of the characters that are about to be consumed by that mouth. This image additionally conjures up the notion of sacrifice, and the idea that a sacrifice must be made to appease that image. The sacrifice is made, and is duly noted in the reaction of the trees when after the first two executions the grandmother "could hear the wind move through the tree tops like a long satisfied insuck of breath"(129).

O'Connor's work is brilliant and rich in symbolism and imagery, but none of her symbols carries more meaning or impact than her "fiercely animistic suns" and her "fortress line of trees" (Asals 69). From the analyzation of these images in just one story, is possible to glean a wealth of insight into both the characters, and the author's own conflicts and convictions. These two images, the sun with its ever-illuminating sunlight - and the shadows of the deep dark woods are an integral part of a Flannery O'Connor story. For without them, the story would not only lose much of its tension and conflict, but a very important part of its identity.