A Good Man is Hard to Find is filled with bland, ordinary things that together make a complex, deep story. In the beginning, it was obvious that the family was not “tight”. The kids did their own thing, the mom stayed with the baby, the dad did his own thing, and the grandmother was nosy into all of their activities. As the family hits the road, the same dynamic was in play, but the grandmother mixed it up by telling the family that there was a point of interest they were missing, and then she persisted in lying and deceiving the rest of her family so that she could go to this place. At that point in the story, the family starts to attract their personalities together slightly by finding interest as a unit. Unlike other gothic literature, this one change in the family’s personalities was the only character alteration throughout the story. Because of the prior stories read in the Gothic unit for this course, I thoroughly expected there to be at least one more character alteration in either the Misfit or the grandmother.
Perhaps the most interesting kink of the story was the final scene between the grandmother and the Misfit. The grandmother was a Christian, and asked the Misfit why he was doing these things to people, she didn’t mention her family, and to please have mercy on her because “she’s a lady”. One part of her lecture that stood out to me was when she stopped talking directly to the Misfit and cried out “Jesus. Jesus. Jesus.”. She wasn’t asking Him to take her as His child, she was wanting Him to save her from death. This shows a very good point about some people that call themselves Christians. They don’t want to die, but they love their Lord that will be there when they die. It’s a sad, but realistic situation that mostly older people find themselves in.
I enjoyed the ending. I felt that the ending showed that there are more endings than just killing someone and running away, or going insane and nearly killing yourself. This ending was not the true ending to the story. The true ending happens later when the Misfit realizes that he has the ability to be a good person again because of the grandmothers words that day and the way that she reached out to him before he shot her.
The use of foreshadowing made the story very predictable, with the exception of the final scene. The grandmother says early in the story that, “In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady”. This foreshadows not only that she would be in an accident, but also that she was self consumed because she thought ladies had a certain “shield” to protect them. Another example took place while the family stopped for food at Red Sammy’s and Red Sam walked up to them at their table and said “You can’t win. You can’t win. These days you don’t know who to trust, ain’t that the truth?” while sighing and wiping his brow with sweat. There were multiple other uses, and all of them were very obvious. The story has an ‘in your face’ aura when it comes to this aspect.
snapef13 