A Good Man Is Hard To Find Literary Analysis Essay

Flannery O’Connor uses style, tone, and character to tell the story of a family and a band of misfits as they struggle with good over evil in the Southern Gothic short story ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ (Kirszner & Mandell, 2012). The style and tone of the characters are depicted in a way that makes it difficult to feel compassion or sympathy for them. The figurative language and style used by the author depicts characters with casual, informal, and extreme Southern stereotypes, diction and attitudes. The tone of the story is ironic in regard to both the characters and plot. O’Connor uses colorful language to describe the characters of the story in a way that allows the reader to vividly see the characters as cartoon like, grotesque, and exaggerated.
The informal language, creative word choice, and diction used by all of the characters in this story are true to the Southern Gothic genre short story style (Kirszner & Mandell, 2012). Southern imagery extends beyond the characters to the setting and language. As we read about dirt roads, southern plantations, “red clay banks”, and crops in the field, we are

296). Even though we can surmise from the reading the grandmother’s family is being murdered just feet away from her, the author’s use of grotesque characterization makes it difficult to be sympathetic to the grandmother (Kirszner & Mandell, 2012). When the grandmother “raised her head like a parched old turkey hen” it is difficult to sympathize due to this dehumanizing characterization (Kirszner & Mandell, 2012, p. 308). The language creates an image is so vivid the reader can almost visualize the grandmother as a cartoon character shrieking as she called out in desperation for her “Bailey Boy” (Kirszner & Mandell, 2012, p.