A Good Man Is Hard To Find Rhetorical Analysis

William Martin

Professor

English

15 April 2017

A Good Man Is Hard To Find: What Is “Good”?

In this work by Mary Flannery O’Connor, the protagonist, referred to as “the grandmother,” tries to persuade her son to take the family to East Tennessee. Her son, Bailey, wants to visit Florida instead and so she tries to change his mind. While doing so, she stumbles upon a newspaper article written about an escaped convict by the name of The Misfit that was headed toward that direction and tries to warn him about it.

During the trip, the family makes a pit stop in Georgia and decides to visit a restaurant called The Tower. It is owned by a man named Red Sammy Butts, who tells the grandmother that he had recently let two men get gas on credit that had never returned to pay to him. She claims that he is a good man for doing so and agrees when he further complains to her that they were becoming increasingly hard to find.

Back on the road, the grandmother

At first, she believes that Red Sammy is one after he complains to her about being swindled. When she applies this term to him, she is praising his foolishness, blind faith and poor judgement in character, all of which are not actually “good” traits. Later, she employs this phrase to The Misfit. She claims that he is one solely off the fact that he looks as if he does not come from “common blood” but nice people. Because she considers being a lady to be morally “good,” she values appearance over actual substance which is ultimately the source of her demise. She assumes that because The Misfit is “good” he will not kill her, which is incorrect because he never told her that he would not. Through her promiscuous use of the word, we are shown just how flimsy her ethical conviction is. When calling others “good,” she does not necessarily mean kind or virtuous, but whosever’s beliefs coincide with her