Southern Gothic Elements In A Good Man Is Hard To Find

No one would have thought that the idyllic Southern life style could be turned into a Southern nightmare. In O 'Connors "A Good Man is Hard to Find" that is precisely what happens. "A Good Man is Hard to Find" is set in Southern America. This story has many tenets comparable to that of Southern Gothic fiction. Southern Gothic writing emphasizes on abnormal character and unusual events to create an unsettling portray of life in Southern America. Most of the characters have broken personalities which are damaged and delusional. People, places, and events in Southern Gothic literature seem to be ordinary at first, but in the end, they reveal to be odd, disturbing and sometimes very gruesome.
"A good man is Hard to Find" is a horrific tale about

The misfit gains awareness of human morals when he kills the grandmother and he says, "She would have been a good woman...if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life" (O 'Connor 1020), he then realized that she wasn 't all that good. O 'Connor did a good job of interpreting the grandmother as a way to put away the values of the old Southern America; she also interprets the Misfit as a type of common man who is defiantly not perfect which can a realistic version of the new Southern America.
In "A Good Man is Hard to Find", the irritating grandmother cares more about matters such as her appearance and manners, she dressed her best for the car ride and the reason for her doing this is so that "In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would at once know that she was a lady." (O 'Connor 1010). The grandmother is a very selfish woman, the first thing she said to the Misfit is "You wouldn 't shoot a lady, would you?" (O 'Connor 1016) in order to save herself; trying to save the rest of the family doesn 't even cross her

These events are easily found in "A Good Man is Hard to Find" because the violence takes place casually at the end of the story, the murderer doesn 't try to be sneaky about it. At the beginning of the story the grandmother talks the family into visiting east Tennessee and not Florida by telling them that a dangerous inmate named "The Misfit" had escaped and is headed to Florida; "The Misfit is aloose from the federal Pen headed toward Florida and you read here what it says he did to these people. Just you read it. I wouldn 't take my children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it. I couldn 't answer to my conscience if it did." (O 'connor 1009). She starts the story off with a sense of darkness and suspense which goes on through the whole story. As the story proceeds the violent and disturbing imagery