Redemption and Meaninglessness in OConnors a Good Man Is Hard to Find - Research Paper Example

April 11, Redemption and Meaninglessness in O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find Did the grandmother truthfully receive grace during the final moments of her life? Several scholars share diverse interpretations of Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find. In the article “O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find,” Hal Blythe and Charlie Sweet argue that O’Connor’s story “fulfills” Yeats’ prophecy in The Second Coming (187). For them, the chaos of the world signifies the birth, not of a Christian redeemer, but a Misfit, a beast which will dehumanize the entire human society. The grandmother may have shared her moment of grace, but it means nothing to an animal like the Misfit. In “Flannery O’Connor’s ‘Spoiled Prophet,’” T.W. Hendricks agrees with Blythe and Sweet that the Misfit is some form of a prophet, but the former stresses that he is a misguided prophet. Finally, the article “Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find: The Moment of Grace,” by Michael Clark, argues that the grandmother received her moment of grace during her moment of death and aims to touch the Misfit and redeem him from his meaningless existence. The family represents the disintegration of human society, but the grandmother receives the gift of grace during her dying moments, and yet the Misfit, who thinks of himself as a prophet, misinterprets this act of grace and seals the emptiness of his life. The family in the story stands for the fragmentation of society, due to lack of spiritual growth. Hendricks points out that the story has explored the “spiritual exile” of two families, Bailey’s and Red Sammy’s families (203). Bailey and his wife are detached from their Southern roots (Hendricks 203). Like Hendricks, Blythe and Sweet assert that Bailey has lost his authority over his mother and children, which has resulted to a family in “disarray” (Hendricks 203). In particular, they suggest that this stands for the fall of “secular authority” (185). The grandmother schemes to “visit some of her connections in east Tennessee,” and she defies Bailey’s instructions to leave her cat (O’Connor). The children also act waywardly by kicking the car seats, yelling, and whining. Their names suggest their spoiled personalities too. John Wesley, whose name feels that his parents had high ambitions for him, is impolite to his grandmother and disrespectful of his family’s history (Hendricks 203). Still, he likens himself to a young Superman and brags that he will beat the Misfit in the face, if they meet him. June Star has tap dancing skills, which tend to get the admiration and interest of adults (Hendricks 203). She has an entertainer’s name, and she already has the disposition of a spoiled child star (Hendricks 203). The whole family represents pieces of chaos that undermine Bailey’s authority, which subsequently represent the fall of spiritual order. Red Sammy Butts, the owner of the Tower roadhouse, and his wife are likewise spiritually disconsolate and emotionally isolated from one another. His road sign calls him “THE FAT BOY WITH THE HAPPY LAUGH,” but in reality, Sammy is downcast and bitter (Hendricks 203). He is not chubby with a positive outlook in life; he is “simply obese,” as his stomach suspends over his belt “like a sack of meal swaying under his shirt” (Hendricks 203). His signs declare that his barbeque is well-known, but when Bailey’s family goes there, the place is empty (Hendricks 203). Sammy also no longer cares what impression he leaves on customers, because when Bailey parks at his restaurant, Sammy is working from under his truck (Hendricks 203). Sammy further grumbles to his customers and treats his wife like a common employee. He has been disloyal to her, and she dislikes it enough to insinuate about it to the family (Hendricks 203). Being childless, she invites June to come and be her “little girl” and she does not know how to praise her dancing, apart from patronizing her (Hendricks 203). This family has no spiritual bonds too like Bailey’s. These families stand for modern society that has no spiritual core; therefore, it has no direction and it is common for families to find no meaning in their existence. The family is loud and aggressive at times, but in reality, they are hollow shells. Hendricks argues that the family represents the acute loss of identity in modern society. Bailey and John Wesley lose their self-assertion, when facing the Misfit and his goons (Hendricks 204). June Star also no longer struggles when she is taken to the woods (Hendricks 204). Bailey takes the family to Florida for vacation, even when no one seems to be truly interested enough to go there (Hendricks 204). John Wesley thinks he is a super hero, while June Star must be dreaming of herself as the next Shirley Temple (Hendricks 204). Hendricks interprets these desires as the absence of autonomy: “None of them is an autonomous being” (204). They cannot assert their will, since they do not know their identities (Hendricks 204). They cannot know their identities because they are focused on material needs. They do not understand their spiritual emptiness and the need to feel God in their lives, a God that can help them find meaning in their lives. The grandmother’s fatal flaw is her belief in her own righteousness. Compared to other characters who are not aware of their appearance and behaviors, the grandmother believes she represents “grace and dignity” (Hendricks 203). She dresses up for the trip, because she considers that when an accident happens, people will instantly recognize her as “a lady” (O’Connor). She also appears to be polite and empathic with others. She hates seeing the rudeness of her grandchildren and tries to teach them good manners. When she sees a naked black child, she explains to her grandchildren that “[l]ittle riggers in the country dont have things like [they] do” (O’Connor). Despite these polite manners, the grandmother exposes her narcissist sense of rightness. She speaks of her concern for the troubles of the rural poor, but still sees them as integral to the picturesque landscape that she intends to paint (Hendricks 204). Her notions of Southern history and culture are also based on romantic fiction, such as Gone With the Wind (Hendricks 204). She places high importance on her social stature, even when that stature is part of a distant past. She brags about her former suitor, Edgar Atkins Teagarden, who has affable manners and has become significantly wealth too (Hendricks 204). The grandmother possibly uses her pretentions to also control Bailey, while essentially annoying her family (Hendricks 204). Indeed, the grandmother believes that she is a lady in charms and a devout Christian in beliefs and manners, and yet she schemes to serve her own interests. She is a model of superficiality, in the same way that the Pharisees are superficial religious elites. The grandmother thinks herself as superior towards others, though inside, she also rots from lack of genuine spiritual enlightenment. The Misfit acts like Jesus, but the only salvation he offers is death, since he has misunderstood the relationship between people and God. Yeats believes that the Second Coming is like a beast with “slow thighs.” Blythe and Sweet connect this looming end with the Misfit’s vehicle that comes “slowly,” “slowly,” and “slower” (186). They stress that the family’s first vision is that the Misfit is like an “older man” with “silver-rimmed spectacles that gave him a scholarly look” (Blythe and Sweet 186). He looks like a prophet at first. Later on, his true nature materializes to the family. He turns into a “beast” (Blythe and Sweet 186). The Misfit says that his father describes him as “a different breed of dog” (O’Connor). Before he kills the grandmother, his voice has a “snarl” when he talks about Jesus who “shown everything off balance” (O’Connor). Blythe and Sweet also compare the Misfit’s buddies with Yeats’ description that the beast has incensed birds around it. Hiram and Bobby Lee are incensed beasts too, since they killed five people, two of them are children. The Misfit is also a lost prophet, because he does not understand that grace is essentially at work in the grandmother’s touch of his shoulder (Hendricks 209). He thinks that “because of her hypocrisy and humanness and banality” the grandmother cannot “be a medium for Grace” (Hendricks 209). Indeed, he has a hard time believing that grace can course through humanity (Hendricks 209). O’Connor says to John Hawkes that the Misfit should be able to plead to Jesus, but society has shown the kind of Jesus who is not a mediator, but more of an “existential challenge”: Haze [Hazel Motes] knows what the choice is and the Misfit knows what the choice is—either throw away everything and follow Him or enjoy yourself by doing some meanness to somebody, and in the end there’s no real pleasure in life, not even in meanness. (Hendricks 209). But the Misfit cannot leave his life behind to follow Jesus, because he was not there when Jesus raised the dead. He cannot believe something he has not witnessed, so he chooses to “do meanness” (O’Connor). Nevertheless, the Misfit teaches Bobby Lee that: “It’s no pleasure in life” to kill people. The Misfit is not slaying the family out of “meanness” or misery, as he had proposed earlier, but doing what he thinks is his bleak duty, where he gets no pleasure (Hendricks 208). He then becomes the judge and savior, prophet and God (Hendricks 208). He has brought the sword that will slaughter people like the grandmother and her family, because they have not lived a truly deep spiritual life (Hendricks 208). The Misfit overlooks the possibility that redemption can also be attained through matter and not only through spiritual actions. O’Connor wrote to T. R. Spivey and John Hawkes and affirms that the incapability to see that grace can go through flawed people is an outcome of what she calls as the “Protestant temper—approaching the spiritual directly instead of through matter” (Hendricks 209). The Catholic perspective, O’Connor believes, is that “[e]verything has to operate first on the literal level” (Hendricks 209). The spiritual can come from material objects such as the sacramental wine or through other people (Hendricks 209). The misfortune of the Misfit is that he has no ability to go from the material to the spiritual level (Hendricks 209). His lifelong skepticism of God’s existence and goodness disables him from receiving God’s grace through the grandmother (Hendricks 209). Clark compares the grandmother’s touch to Paul’s. In his Second Epistle, Paul tells Timothy that true grace can be related to the act of “laying on of hands” (Clark 67). Paul’s hands become the vessel of faith that he endows on Timothy and his family, and the same can be interpreted from how the grandmother loses her superficiality and understands that she and the Misfit are “spiritual kin” (Clark 67). The “charismatic physical contact” should not be considered as something “realistic” to the story or to the grandmother’s last efforts to save herself (Clark 67). Instead, Clark emphasizes O’Connor’s biblical allusions (68). The allusion to Timothy can be seen as the grandmother’s personal experience of receiving grace and her desire to enlighten the Misfit too (Clark 68). The Misfit is a lost and misguided prophet, so he kills people without pleasure. He acts as the judge and the executioner. He executes the family that stands for the narcissist society that has no sense of spiritual direction. The grandmother has shed her superficiality, however, when she realizes that she is dying. She finally understands God’s grace and recognizes the Misfit as a lost child like her. The Misfit, however, has a bleak view of himself as a prophet and misinterprets the touch on his shoulders. He fails to understand that grace is a spirit that can flow from the grandmother to him. As a result, instead of being redeemed, he shuts the final chance in finding meaning in his life. The Misfit lives on to kill, without ever truly living. Works Cited Blythe, Hal, and Charlie Sweet. “O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find.” Explicator 50.3 (1992): 185-187. Print. Clark, Michael. “Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find: The Moment of Grace.” English Language Notes (1991): 66-69. Print. Hendricks. T. W. “Flannery O’Connor’s ‘Spoiled Prophet.’” Modern Age 51.3/4 (2009): 202-210. Print. O’Connor, Flannery. A Good Man is Hard to Find. Web. 1 Apr. 2012. < http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~surette/goodman.html>. Read More