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Gothic Elements In A Good Man Is Hard To Find

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In Flannery O’Connor’s story A Good Man Is Hard To Find, we first meet the main characters talking about the news. The main characters are a family that attempt to go on vacation but end up involved in a non-fatal car accident. While waiting for help, they find the opposite in that of the misfit. The misfit is a criminal psychopath that has escaped federal penitentiary who ends up killing the family in the end. The story, however, gave so many clues about the misfit making an appearance later on that it would be more of a surprise to have a reader not see it coming. Readers who know of Flannery O’Connor (or bothered to read the two paragraphs about her above the story) would already start to get suspicions on the content the story would contain. Ms. O’Connor was a young women that lived in pain due to her living with the horrible disease lupus. She was known for her short stories which were very dark and violent. Her stories were classified as “Sothern Gothic” stories, so someone reading A Good Man Is Hard To Find would already need to start to think that this story will probably be about a man who is not a good man.
If someone failed to know who Flannery O’Connor was, there would be plenty of …show more content…

For the first part, the misfit is mentioned escaping prison. “Here this fellow that calls himself The Misfit is aloose from the Federal Pan…”(O’Connor 436) This is a huge clue because you figure the author put a unique news topic into the story with a person that is mentioned by a nick name. If the author wanted just a simple out of the blue topic inside the story, it would make more since to give the escapee a normal name or at least call him “an escaped prisoner”. This clue combined with what people know about the author and remembering what the title is more than enough to conclude that the misfit will make an appearance with deadly

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