The sinful Christian Mrs. Hopewell brandishes her religion to place herself as a judge of people as decent and respectable. She is a sinner herself despite her attempts to use her Christianity as a barrier. Mrs. Hopewell tells Manley: I think there aren’t enough good country people in the world! I think that’s what’s wrong with it… You don’t see any more real honest people unless you go way out in the country. Of course, this judgment of Manley is incorrect since he is a liar. The name "Hopewell" (hope well) characterizes the mother. She fails to see the world as a mixture of good and evil. This leads her to assume that the world is simpler than it is. Her sin is thinking that she as a Christian can make judgments about everyone. Hypocrisy …show more content…
He just sells Bibles and goes around the country trying to get the good book in people’s homes and make some money for himself. In the barn loft with Hulga, the reader meets the real Pointer. He is the ultimate deceiver. When he pulls out his perverted accoutrements hidden in a cutaway Bible, even Hulga, the atheist, is appalled. O’Connor uses Pointer as an example of the hypocritical aspect of society that pretends to be a Christian, but actually scams and hurts people. He tells Hulga at her most vulnerable point: The boy’s mouth was set angrily. “I hope you don’t think that I believe in that crap! I may sell Bibles but I know which end is up and I wasn’t born yesterday and I know where I’m going.” To exacerbate Hulga’s humiliation, he steals her glasses and her prosthetic leg. He adds them to his perverted collection. Knowing that Hulga had felt superior to him, as he leaves her in the barn loft, he tells her that she is not as smart as she thinks she is. This is not the first time that Manly Pointer has hurt someone. Now, he will continue on treating people like fools and luring them into his deception. He stands as the representation of the evil aspect of
They kiss somewhat more and Manley at last takes Hulga 's leg. She gets furious, however Manley declines to return it. He opens up his Bible to uncover it 's holding bourbon and cards; things being what they are he is a trick craftsman and Manley Pointer isn 't his genuine name. Hulga gets angrier with him, yet Manley packs up his stuff and discloses to her that, in spite of her instruction, he, a basic book of scriptures businessperson, figured out how to trick her. He at that point keeps running off with her leg, abandoning her powerless in the
Through biblical allusion, religious analogy, and symbolism O 'Connor expresses the need for god and a savior. She writes the perspective of a young child named Harry who lives in a household without religion. The young man is given the mentality and ideology of Christianity and the value of baptism. He grows for a need to belong to something from his small world and gives his life to Christ.
Redemption is the act of being saved from acts of evil and sin. The debate of whether human nature is redeemable or not has been one to plaque religious scholars. In Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, this question continues in the interactions between the characters; the most notable being the Grandmother of a rather horrible family and the Misfit, a murderer. While on a road trip, these two characters’ paths collide and lead to a rather unfortunate end where the Grandmother and her family are killed. While many readers believe the ending creates and overall negative tone of the story, some believe that there is a hope for redemption; the story’s author O’Connor who is a devoted Catholic included.
In the short story, "A Good Man is Hard to Find" the grandmother's superficial goodness towards other individuals is significant to contrast with the evil "The Misfit" obtains. For the duration of the story, the grandmother fears "The Misfit" and strives to avoid the evil he possesses; however, we learn it is inevitable that his existence will eventually encompass her when they make acquaintance. The Misfit seamlessly endangers others with the careless actions he perpetrates, and in return, displays minimal remorse. Readers of the story may easily be perplexed by the motives the Misfit obtains to commit heinous acts onto innocent victims; however, lack of religious conscience, moral blindness and intermittent conversation with the grandmother
Flannery O’Connor, in her short life, wrote one novel and many short stories that impact literature to this day. She wrote two superb short stories, A Good Man is Hard to Find and Good Country People, which have many similarities hidden in the theme of their complex text. While both stories include themes about religion, identity, and the way we view others, the endings are astoundingly different. Nonetheless, O’Connor’s main theme concerning the way we view other people, is the most significant in both short stories. In Good Country People, Mrs. Hopewell repeatedly states that the bible salesman is the “salt of the earth” meaning that he is just a good and simple country boy.
In Good Country People by Flannery O’Connor, Manley Pointer a young unassuming Bible salesman successfully dupes Hulga Hopewell an unattractive yet prideful atheist with a PhD into giving him her false leg. Pointer is a man who exploits the weakness of other in order to achieve his goals. He often does this by sympathizing with other people’s conditions in life or allowing them to believe they have the upper hand. Hulga and Manley first meet when he tries to sell Mrs. Hopewell, Hulga’s mother, a Bible.
“...The hunting accident...the leg had been literally blasted off” (O’Connor 484), this sentence mentioned by the author symbolizes Hulga’s personality, because when something very valuable is taken away from someone and they are aware of it, but are not able to react to it, it could change a person drastically. Hulga could have been a totally different women if she had her leg, that’s why the author decided to give her a wooden leg. In the story the author mentions how Hulga does not care about her appearance at all. When she goes on a date with Manley Pointer she wears a dirty white shirt, applies Vapex as perfume, and never smiles. “...
Literary Analysis ENG2106 Student name: Li Michaela Bernice Student ID: 4002551 Word count: Grace and sins Flannery O’Connor was a Southern author from America who frequently wrote in a Southern Gothic style and depended vigorously on local settings and bizarre characters. Her works likewise mirrored her Roman Catholic faith and regularly examined questions of morality and ethics. She created violence in the end of both “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and “Everything that Rises Must Converge” to put the stories to the end. She asserted that she has found that violence is strangely capable of returning her characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace, and also violence is the extreme situation that best reveals who
The artificial leg that Hulga “was as sensitive about the artificial leg as a peacock about his tail” symbolizes her vulnerability and her dependence on things despite what she may think, but from this it would be nearly impossible to guess that Manley was
We all have individual rights. For example, the right to believe in anything we would like to believe in without being persecuted or thrown into jail. We are entitled to have our own thoughts and opinions, but in the book Inherit the Wind written by Robert E.Lee and Jerome Lawrence we see that having your own individual beliefs or thoughts is unacceptable and wrong. Bert cates, the main character of Inherit the Wind is an evolutionist teacher at Hillsboro public school.
It is not until the very end of the story that readers are shown the true character of Manley Pointer. It is possible that the motive for stealing Hulga’s leg is that Mrs. Freeman hired the Bible salesman to steal the artificial leg from her. “Something about her seemed to fascinate Mrs. Freeman and then one day Hulga realized that it was the artificial leg” (O’connor 436). It is interesting that
“Her characters, who sometimes accept and other times reject salvation, often have a warped self-image, especially of their moral status and of the morality of their actions” (Hobby). This addresses how some of the important lines in the story describe to the reader about the extreme exaggeration and the psychological realism of the church, which O’Connor wanted to express within her story. The extreme use of exaggeration and how the use of the characters bring a sense of an uncanny feeling of good and evil within each character, portrays how deep the meaning is seen in this short story. “the story is filled with dark, grotesque humor created largely by the story 's many ironies” (Hobby). The author of this source highly emphasizes that O’Connor creates this dark humor for her characters to build on her meaning in the story and uses irony to create the distortion within her
" This makes the readers think that Mrs. Hopewell will go through the same experience in order to destroy her confidence and control to use Mrs. Freeman. As readers, we should think differently when we read a story especially Ms. Flannery O’Connor's stories. We should not think that she is mocking religion, as she is a religious person herself. There can be instances where we feel like we want to be able to feel or experience the story itself. What we don’t see in the story is how Ms. O'Connor's characters used the idea of religion, how all are equally guilty and showing hypocrisy, at the same time become aware to their
Flannery O’Connor is a renowned Southern author, noted for her gothic works and heavily Catholic themes. She focuses predominantly on racial tensions, morality, and divine grace. The religious and moral themes of her short story, A Good Man is Hard to Find, converge on the character of the grandmother. Despite the self-proclamations of fulfilling what it means to be a Southern lady, Grandmother holds a superficial grasp of her religion. Throughout the story, the Grandmother never truly changed, only her ostensible actions did.
Mr. Worldly Wise's urge for Christian was unsuccessful, because Christian is not supposed to settle for the good; he aims for the best. His moment of weakness is a sin because he nearly gives up his goal to reach the Celestial City, which is the Heaven. Village of Morality is comfortable, but it will never completely ease him of his burden, which is sin, in the way Celestial City will.