Jesus Thrown Everything Off Balance: Grace and Redemption in Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find"

Abstract

By creating flawed, hypocritical, and sometimes mad characters, Flannery O’Connor demonstrates the religious decay of the South in her short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” While they appear to be quite different on the surface, Grandma and The Misfit are both the same at the core: sinners in need of Christ’s redemption. The Misfit is blatantly sinful and enraged at the concept of God’s grace, and Grandma masks her sinfulness with respectability and chooses to treat God as something that she can accept or ignore depending on her situation, a common practice of “good” Southern Christians of O’Connor’s time. O’Connor sends her characters on a quest where they must confront God’s redemption and make a choice to either embrace it or turn away from it. Through her characters and their journey, O’Connor creates a tale of hypocrisy, sin, and the hope of forgiveness in the Christ-Haunted South.