Setting And Characters Of A Good Man Is Hard To Find - Essay Example

Setting And Characters Of A Good Man Is Hard To Find Story Overviews Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is a short story about a grandmother and her family who decide to go on vacation to Florida. The grandmother is against going to Florida, wanting to spend her time in Tennessee. In an attempt to convince her son to change his mind, she tells him that an escaped convict is making his way to Florida. As they make their way to Florida regardless, the grandmother mentions an old house that she wants to visit. After realizing that the house is in a different state, she causes her son to get into an accident. The escaped convict that the grandmother had used as an excuse to avoid Florida is the first to arrive at the scene. After trying to talk him down, the convict kills the grandmother and her family. William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” opens with the death of Emily Grierson, but then divulges into the life she lived prior to her death. After the death of her father, Emily lived a very sheltered life. She seldom left her home, and she eventually became a topic of great curiosity. When Homer, a contract worker with a construction company, arrives in town, he and Emily spend a lot of time together. It is assumed that they get married, and Homer moves in to Emily’s home. However, after many years and very few glimpses of Emily or Homer, it becomes apparent that Emily has died. When they inspect the house, the people come to realize that Homer had also been dead, but his death had taken place much sooner than Emily’s. Character The grandmother in “A Good Man is Hard to Find” was a very conceited, self-centered woman whose actions proved to get the best of everyone. Even though her family wants to go to Florida, the grandmother is more concerned with where she wants to go. She even lies about the convict heading to Florida to make her son change his mind. When they are on the way to Florida, the grandmother decides to visit an old house from her past, though it is too late when she realizes that the house was in another state. Her self-centered attitude caused her family to wind up in the predicament that they did. Finally, when the convict, The Misfit, is baring down on the grandmother, though she is upset at the state of her family, as many of them have died at this point, the grandmother’s sole concern is for herself. She wants to make sure that she gets out of the situation alive. Similarly, Emily in “A Rose for Emily” was also more preoccupied with herself over others, and this caused someone, if not many people, to die. Her concerns and her needs would be met no matter what she had to do. Not wanting to be alone or give up the people that she was close to, Emily harbored her father’s dead body for a few days before she finally surrendered him for his funeral. Though he needed to be laid at rest, Emily was more concerned with how she felt about the situation. When she bought the arsenic, at first it was believed that she was going to kill herself, but after the townspeople found the dead body of Homer hidden in Emily’s home, it was assumed that she had poisoned him so that she would never have to be apart from him until she died. Again, she was acting on her own desires, not acknowledging Homer’s need to want to stay alive. Setting The settings between the two stories are vastly different. The grandmother from the first story is clearly from a very closed, dangerous world (Coles 89). As such, the grandmother was able to validly use the accuse of the escaped convict. In most scenarios involving car accidents, the first person to the scene often helps the family in danger. In “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” the person to arrive immediately after the car accident is a convict. Instead of helping them, he kills the entire family, including the children. It is a devastating, unfortunate world, and while the grandmother may have lied about the whereabouts of the convict to change vacation plans, she still knew the kind of world that her family was living in. She was aware of the dangers that it presented without warning. Emily’s world, on the other hand, is a stereotypical small town, one in which all the people are close, both physically and otherwise (Hinkle 64). Everybody knew the business and goings-on of everybody else, including the happenings with Emily, despite the fact that she hardly made appearances after her father’s death. It was a safe, closed off world, much as Emily had been closed off inside her house. It was such a small, close-knit town where strange and scary things were simply not meant to happen. Just as the grandmother in “A Good Man is Hard to Find” lived in a dark and dangerous world, Emily had the blessing of living in a place at the completely opposite end of the spectrum. The similarity between the two settings is that the people in each story did not expect what they discovered. The grandmother’s son, Bailey, heeded the grandmother’s warnings about the escaped convict because he did not believe that it would be possible to run into him. The world might have been a dangerous place, but he did not think that it was that bad. In the small town in “A Rose for Emily,” the townspeople, though acknowledging that something was not right about Emily, never would have thought that something as twisted as a case of necrophilia, which possibly involved a murder, was taking place within their small, safe, comfortable town. Tone The tone of both of the stories is that of fear, though this emotion does not make itself apparent in either story until towards the end. In “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” the story turns to fear after the car accident. However, it exists in a smaller portion at the beginning of the story, when the grandmother first hears about the convict. It dies down, remaining beneath the surface, until Bailey crashes the car. In “A Rose for Emily,” the fear follows a similar pattern. Though the tone starts out as curiosity, it changes abruptly to fear the second it is realized that Emily bought arsenic. It remains there through to the end of the story when it is discovered that she is dead and that she more than likely killed Homer. Works Cited Coles, Robert. Flannery O’Connor’s South. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993. Print. Hinkle, James. Reading Faulkner. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. Print. Read More