The Fabric of Characterization, Theme, and Setting in A Good Man Is Hard to Find - Research Paper Example

The Fabric of Characterization, Theme, and Setting in A Good Man Is Hard to Find Frederick Asals in his Introduction to the book A Good Man Is Hard to Find: Flannery O’Connor notes the story “was established for long enough to remain the single tale most immediately associated with Flannery O’Connor” (4). The story on first reading appears to be a casual treatment of a world where the mundane and the bizarre clash. It appears cold marred by stark absurdism and most of her short stories proceed to a routine ending of repulsive deaths, cruel fatalities, and emotional devastation for many characters. It is open-ended where the reader simply gapes at the end in uncertainty. But a modicum of insight into the interests and craftsmanship of Flannery O’Connor makes her writing commendable on both literary and religious grounds. “Cathartic bitterness, a belief in grace as something devastating to the recipient, a gelid concept of salvation, and violence as a force for good” (Galloway) characterize her work. She was well aware of her dual role as a Catholic writer and a fiction writer. She only tried to homogenize both. Thus where the religious dimension was never far away from her writing she was also influenced by Martin Heidegger’s concept of dasein: the moment of death makes a man’s existence replete with meaning. She blends characterization with the setting and works out the meaning of the story. In the following analysis let us look at the dynamics of characterization, theme, and setting in Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find. Characterization Good characters inspire strong feelings. Characterization should not begin and end midway but should be continued till the end as the characters evolve. Extraneous characters should be avoided and all the characters should contribute in varying degrees to the progress of the plot and depth of the story. A Good Man Is Hard to Find is a reasonable example for good characterization. The action in the story unfolds through the grandmother. She is the volatile person in the story with a glib tongue. The old lady is however a Christian only by appearances. Her moral platitude is her reality. When that is stripped by her confrontation with the killer there is no future for the character of the grandmother. "Why youre one of my babies. Youre one of my own children!" (O’Connor 132). These words are definitely not to influence the killer against shooting her but it is her saving moment of grace where she realizes the hollowness of her hitherto existence and recognizes the Misfit as the medium of the grace. O’Connor was compassionate to her characters. She gives them a chance to receive grace but it comes at the moment of gruesome death. She describes the grandmother being caught in the most significant moment in the life of a Christian, which is facing death. Galloway surmises in his article that facing death as a Christian was the “motivational engine” for her writing but the theme got a signature application in her stories where her characters inevitably die not being Christians. The words of the Misfit, “She would have been a good woman . . . if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life” (O’Connor 133) are appalling but it is sadly true. The character of the grandmother is self-centered and morally platitudinous, completely unaware spiritually. OConnor provides her with an epiphany, one which she probably would not have been able to deal with, had she lived. Self-knowledge can be a curse, and, indeed, it is the characters that are allowed to live that are the more to be pitied, for they are confronted with the unbearable truth of their own folly, their own pathetic, wasted lives, which they can no longer deny. They are stripped bare and flogged by the Truth. (Galloway) The Misfit has experienced grace and deliberately rejected it. He has knowingly chosen his way of life. The Misfit thus becomes a violent means of force that reveals grace and salvation to the lady. “A character or a scene may be presented by the author so as to lead us toward a certain way of thinking about the materials presented” (Scholes et al. 131). The name Misfit is as good as it is. He remains one throughout the story and hops about from one role in life to another. He has had roller-coaster experiences and is haunted and convicted by God. The Misfit typifies the freedom as existential angst and the workings of an agnostic/skeptical mind. He was born with a deeper, complex personality compared to his siblings. But in the absence of a positive influence or a quirk of fate he erred in his life choices. When we meet him in the story he comes across as a character that seems to have made his decision for life: unrepentant and masochistic with amusing streaks refinement and decorum. It is only toward the end, when he says, “it’s no real pleasure in life” (O’Connor 133), there is some kind of resolution for the Misfit because in an act of grace where two are involved there is a palpable change for both. Characterization is often closely linked with the setting. Elements of Literature edited by Robert Scholes et al. records: “In realistic fiction, which includes most novels and short stories, writers have tried to emphasize the lifelikeness of their characters. This means that such writers have tried to surround these characters with details drawn from contemporary life” (129). Sure enough the grandmother’s worldly appeal, Southern hypocrisy, and the grandkids’ careless attitude to their grandmother reflect the time and generation of the writer’s world. Good characters are at once individual and typical. As O’Connor experiments with her Christian interests we find cross currents in the grandmother and the Misfit. The grandmother travels from hypocrisy to genuine redemption and the Misfit swings from morality to despair and agnosticism. While these two characters occupy the limelight the rest of them linger in the background providing links for action in the story. Red Sam represents the general belief of humanity in virtue and goodness; Bailey is taciturn and nervous; the mother is ordinary; and June Star and John Wesley are siblings representing a newer impatient generation. Theme Theme is simply the author’s treatment of the topic in a literary work. Many a time theme is implied rather than directly stated. The title of the story is generally a wise pointer to its theme. The particular title gives us an inkling of a possible impending crisis in the story ‑ an unsettling foreboding. The grandmother and the Misfit is a deliberate pair by O’Connor to project the dichotomy between good and evil, which comprises a prominent theme in the story. Their destinies are bound right at their meeting. When the grandmother mentions the Misfit as “one of her babies,” she feels a vague sense of strong connection with the killer. She has a final moment of epiphany where salvation has already been released to her and in the enlightened rapturous moment she is overwhelmed by a kindred sense of humanity. Thus the grandmother’s spiritual void is turned into spiritual fulfillment by the violent and startling intervention of the Misfit. They are the first set of honest words she says but it does not salvage her. Here is what we could call the Flannerian twist comes. The reader is thrown off-guard and too much happens in too less a time. And this crucial moment of the story’s descent to violence is accompanied by a simultaneous ascent to salvation received by the grandmother, which salvages her life from petty materialistic existence. The grandmother earns her salvation at the cost of her death; death being issued by the nihilistic Misfit. Their connection outlines O’Connor’s treatment of the comic and violent, her compulsive interest in the Christian religion as reinforced by her Roman Catholic influence. The jarring shift from comedy to tragedy pans out the grandmother as a caricature. O’Connor’s thematic interest in life and death in the story is noteworthy. She attributes death to the grandmother who has not committed a mortal sin like the Misfit. But the Misfit continues to live, maybe with a vague sense of insight; a pathetic figure for whom life is a burden finding meaning in nothing. He is someone left in limbo and maybe even purposefully choosing to be so because he experienced salvation and rejected it. There is ample suggestiveness in the story about its culmination in death. But O’Connor crafts her way through the story with such candor gleaning material from the sunny side of life that the reader overlooks the suggestions and is suddenly jerked by the dramatic turn of tone. Flannery’s preoccupation with death as a recurrent theme in her writing, along with unfair twist of fate, takes autobiographical coloring. She was diagnosed with lupus she inherited from her father which terminated her life at thirty nine. The coldness of her writing could be attributed to physical death that stalked her. Flannery takes care to distil the fact that there are more grays in life than blacks and whites through her characterization of the grandmother and the Misfit. The grandmother is naïve shielded from the brutality of the world but is hypocritical and interfering. The Misfit is base and immoral but has his decorous and mellow moments. The story as the title goes unveils disappointment in human beings. The cold bloodedness and the pessimism are redeemed only by her unique approach to the comic. Theme is again bound to the setting of the story. “If the story is realistic it will be best understood by those readers whose experience has equipped them with information about the aspect of reality toward which the story points” (Scholes et al. 131). A peep into the milieu of the story, which follows, adds to its cumulative reading experience. The motif of old Southern values and traditions is clearly portrayed through the grandmother with her heightened consciousness of good blood, her unconscious affinity for appearances, didacticism, and her judgmental temperament. Asals suggests that she is among the pioneers of O’Connor characters to ground her work in the realm of “manners.” She exemplifies “an everyday worldliness concerned with such matters as family relations, dress and appearance, etiquette, economic and social status (Asals 6). She has the old Southern trend of neat, conventional attire. “The grandmother had on a navy blue straw sailor hat with a bunch of white violets on the brim and a navy blue dress with a small white dot in the print” (O’Connor 118). She dresses up formally and even uses white cotton gloves in contrast to the mother of the kids who is casually dressed in slacks. “A belief of the old South was that a person could be considered a good person based on their ancestry or blood; the higher the class a family was, the better the person was assumed to be” (Perez). The grandmother nurtures this strong genteel consciousness by which she tries to manipulate the murderous intentions of the Misfit. She repeats to the Misfit that he is “not a bit common” (O’Connor 128) and exhorts him to stick to the code of high blood of not shooting a lady. She is a harmless Southern hypocrite who clings to blue blood keeping her eye on the imperatives of this world. It is worth noting how Flannery portrays this good-intentioned lady as the cause of the cataclysmic tragedy in the end. Though O’Connor never made racial allusions the central theme of her writing, there is always a passage like the following in each of her stories: "In my time," said the grandmother, folding her thin veined fingers, "children were more respectful of their native states and their parents and everything else. People did right then. Oh look at the cute little pickaninny!" she said and pointed to a Negro child standing in the door of a shack. "Wouldnt that make a picture, now?" she asked and they all turned and looked at the little Negro out of the back window. He waved. "He didnt have any britches on," June Star said. "He probably didnt have any," the grandmother explained. "Little niggers in the country dont have things like we do. If I could paint, Id paint that picture," she said. (O”Connor 119) Setting Setting is the temporal and spatial dimension of a story. It can refer to the physical description of surroundings or be termed as milieu, which includes the context beyond the immediate surroundings of the story. Flannery was a writer who feverishly drew from her surroundings in life and milieu to enrich the setting of her writing. In this story we can see numerous instances of rich local color and comic/unassuming description of the Southern milieu. Flannery was born in Savannah, Georgia, a Southern state which belonged to the “Christ-haunted” religious belt. Research shows that her work was fiercely influenced by the spiritual heritage of her region. It is an interesting irony in the story that in the imagined Tennessee down the dirt road the grandmother faces one of her “connections.” The author also pays in-depth attention to the idiosyncratic dialect of the Misfit. Flannery breathes the post-War unrest well into the ambience of the story. Asals refers to the visible traces of the time of its composition. Red Sammy’s advertising includes the patriotic claim that he is a veteran and he wears “khaki” trousers, which is a reminder of the Second World War reverberations that were still discernible in the early fifties. The conversation that ensues between the grandmother and Red Sam where they concur on blaming Europe points to the Marshall Plan of aid to the war-struck Europe. The fifties’ touches can also be traced in the tap dance lessons of June Star; her reference to the popular television show “Queen for a Day”; the mother’s attire in the slacks and head-kerchief; and Patti Page’s popular western tune “The Tennessee Waltz”(Asals 6, 7). We find a motif of Tennessee in the story which is part of the author’s Southern nostalgia. This glides into the opening lines of the story, “The grandmother didnt want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee…” (O’Connor 117) and connects with the reference to the waltz that gauges the temporality of action. The grandmother’s ingrained racism reflects the racism of post-war South in the immediately preceding years of the civil rights movement. The Misfit’s incoherent theological rambling is an essential part of O’Connor’s religious framework in her writing, which is never too loud or didactic but is always present. It is amusing that the quaint story of Mr. Teagarden and the grandmother’s unconsummated love includes watermelons. Georgia has remained an extensive producer of watermelons ranking third in the U. S. Conclusion The entire story cannot be deveined to evolve a well-boxed interpretation with clinical precision. “It deals with human immorality and shows how unpredictable and unimaginable our destiny can be” (essay-911.com). But her innate skill to combine the comic and the simple with an all-pervasive psychologically depressive development of her creative energy won her the title of the master of Southern Gothic. She dovetails a simple style with constant emotional strain with unusual grace. The application of the comic and the violent to the spiritual should not be mistaken for Flannery’s ludicrous treatment of religion. She was deep-rooted in Roman Catholicism and had a personalized vision of Christ and salvation; unorthodox, yes but never derogatory. The Catholic mindset accepts mystery as a fact of life: some of the workings of the universe and its ways are clear only to God. She was often criticized for the lack of a clear moral ground in her stories. The audience who understood this unconventional outlook on religion and thus the essence of her fiction was limited. Works Cited Asals, Frederick, ed. A Good Man is Hard to Find: Flannery OConnor (Women Writers: Text and Contexts). NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993. Print. essay-911.com. “A Good Man Is Hard to Find written by Flannery O’Connor.” n.d. Web. 21 Nov. 2009. Galloway, Patrick. “The Dark Side of the Cross: Flannery O’Connor’s Short Fiction.” cyberpat.com. n.d. Web. 22 Nov. 2009. O’Connor, Flannery. The Complete Short Stories. London: Faber and Faber, 1990. Print. Perez, Jaclyna. “Flannery OConnors A Good Man is Hard to Find: Motif of Old Southern Values as Evidenced by the Grandmother.” modern-american-fiction.suite101.com. 1 Apr. 2009. Web. 21 Nov. 2009. Scholes, Robert, Comley, Nancy R., Klaus, Carl H., and Silvermann, Michael, eds. Elements of Literature Essay, Fiction, Poetry, Drama, Film. NY: Oxford University Press, Inc., 1991. Print. The Fabric of Characterization, Theme, and Setting in A Good Man Is Hard to Find Name Course Name of instructor Date Read More