A Good Man Is Hard To Find: A Literary Analysis

At first when one thinks of Tolkien and O’Connor, they do not seem to have many things in common. One is a British author who writes about secondary worlds, with magical characters, where the other is an American Author who writes about ironic, darkly funny Southern Gothic stories that end grotesquely. In this class, we had the opportunity to read many different types of short stories that had multiple themes that expressed Catholic Worldview. For example, Flannery O’Connor who is the author of A Good Man is Hard to Find, who liked to write about mysterious, and odd characters. Compared to JRR Tolkien the author of the famous Lord of the Ring series. He liked to write about Elves, Dwarfs, Wizards, Hobbits and humans in the middle Earth world.

In the class, we were assigned to read the book Silmarillion which is Tolkien’s first and last book he ever wrote. It was the first story he started to write but it was never published till his son decided to publish it for him after he died. The Silmarillion is not a traditional, single-text novel, but a collection of five different stories that all tie together. The stories that make up the parts in the book are broken up into the “Ainulindale,” “Valaquenta,” “Quenta Silmarillion,” “Akallabeth,” and “Of the Rings of Power and

A Good Man is Hard to find is one of the easiest ways to see the dark grace theme. In the story there is a character that is called the Misfit and he compares of himself as Jesus. He is the one to decide if the family is going to live or die in the end. He ends up killing the whole family, but saves the grandma for last and gives her a one final chance for redemption. That is where the reader can find a characteristic of Catholic World view. The Grandma found Communion in a moment of dark grace at the end of the story, for example, where she finally has compassion on another person and reaches out to him right at the moment of