Guide Questions on A Good Man Is Hard to Find PDF

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I DONT REMEMBER...

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Guide Questions on “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (Flannery O’Connor)

1: This story ends in extreme violence. However it begins in a very ordinary situation, with an urban family having a leisurely breakfast before they leave for a short holiday trip. O’Connor takes several pages—during which very little happens—to introduce the family to us. Throughout this opening section, there are accumulating signs that this is a failed family—the kind psychologists call ‘dysfunctional’. Find and list some of the specific actions or remarks that show the strange emptiness or ‘deadness’ of this family. 1] Don’t agree to the place where they want to go on vacation. Arguing a lot. 2] 3]

2: Bailey, the children’s father, is not a great parent. Is there another example, from much later in the story, of a parent who was a failure with his child? 3: There’s a strange passage early in the story concerning a “Negro child” (the paragraph begins “’In my time…’”). What’s wrong with this incident? Why is it included in the story? 4: What is the actual name of Red Sammy’s roadside diner? Is there anything strange, or wrong, about this name? Why is it called this—and why is this rather small detail in the story? The owner of the Tower restaurant. Red Sammy is a good man according to the grandmother, trusting and even gullible to a fault. The grandmother, Red Sammy, and the Misfit’s nostalgia for the past suggest that they all believe that a “good man” was easier to come by long ago and that pursuing goodness in the present day is difficult and even pointless. During the car trip, the grandmother reminisces about an old suitor, Edgar Adkins Teagarden, who brought her a watermelon every weekend. She suspects she should have married him because he was a gentleman—and therefore a “good man” as well—and became wealthy. Red Sammy and the grandmother reminisce about the past, when people could be trusted. Red Sammy says outright that “a good man is hard to find,” considering himself—gullible and foolish—to be one of this dying breed. Even the Misfit remembers things his father said and did as well as the unfairness of his punishment for crimes that he can’t remember committing. According to these characters, the present is rife with ambiguity and unhappiness, and things were much different long ago. In a way, this belief allows them to stop short of deeply

exploring their own potential for goodness because they’ve convinced themselves that the world is not conducive to it. 5: Another brief incident involves a pet monkey outside the diner. What is the color of the monkey’s fur? What detail later in the story does this connect with? How else does the monkey connect with later elements in the story? Why would the author, O’Connor, plant such small but real parallels between different parts of her story? 6: There are a number of hints—some fairly obvious, some more subtle—of approaching disaster in the story (what are often called “foreshadowing details”). Find and list at least three here. 1] 2] 3] 7: What color is the Misfit’s car? Why? Black 8: Red Sammy and the Misfit say and do similar things. The grandmother says almost identical things to each man. What are some of the main parallels? 1] They believe in a good man 2] 9: Do any details suggest that Red Sammy and his wife don’t have a great relationship? Which ones? 1] 2] 10: At different points throughout the story, the woods are described—briefly, but carefully. What are three or four of the most noticeable, actually quite strange, descriptions? List them here: 1] 2] 3]

4] 11: At a key point in the story (the paragraph begins, “’Yes mam,’ he said…”), the Misfit says he comes from the “finest people in the world,” that “God never made a finer woman than my mother and my daddy’s heart was pure gold.” After these remarks, what is the very next thing the Misfit says? We know by now that O’Connor, the author, places every detail and remark where she wants it, for a reason. What is the possible connection between these two adjacent statements of the Misfit—which he seems to say with real emphasis? 12: If you’re still not convinced (by the logic of question #11), what other disturbing detail do we learn, within a page or two, about the Misfit’s relationship with his father? 13: What disturbing details in the Misfit’s short summary of his life experiences (the paragraph begins, “’I was a gospel singer…’”)—may show his real feelings about women? 1) 2)

3) 14: Until the last page, only Hiram and Bobby Lee have been doing the killing. What suddenly triggers the Misfit’s own murderous impulse at the end? Why does it set him off in this way? 15: The author is careful to describe the looks of two faces, after the final murder. How does the dead grandmother look? How does the Misfit look? Quote the key descriptions. Now: what could these strange final descriptions—especially the one of the grandmother—possibly mean?...