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Flannery O Connor's Short Stories

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Flannery O’Connor is widely known for her southern gothic style short stories which entail characters who question their morals. Living in Georgia her entire life, O’Connor was deep in the bible belt and invested herself in Roman Catholicism. Many readers can assume while reading her short stories that she was extremely religious due to the fact religion plays a role and is a theme in each short story. O’Connor was an important addition to American Literature in the early twentieth century being that she composed two novels, thirty-two short stories, and a handful of commentaries and reviews. She was also the first writer born in the nineties to have her works collected and published in the Library of America. In her story “A Good Man Is Hard …show more content…

Following this formula even concerning herself, she dresses as a proper southern “lady” although they will be traveling in the car for hours on the route from Georgia to Florida (O’Connor 544). O’Connor describes, “In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know that once she was a lady” (544). Here, we can see how O’Connor uses the grandmother’s personality and words to reveal the future outcome of the family’s planned vacation. Another form of foreshadowing for readers is when the family makes their first stop at a roadside barbecue café to have lunch. In casual conversation with the waitress, the Grandmother inquires, “Did you read about that criminal The Misfit, that’s escaped?” (O’Connor 547). The waitress replies, “I would not be a bit surprised he did not attack this place right here” (O’Connor 547). The owner of the café ponders and recalls about the day before when two men drove in and charged their gas on a credit. Here, readers are introduced to the phrase, or the title of the story, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (O’Connor 547). O’Connor uses the title of the story in their conversation in order to emphasize that The Misfit drove by and told the owner of the café that he worked at the mill so he could charge the gas. What this means is O’Connor desires readers to figure out that The Misfit and the family are most likely headed in the same

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