MOY 1 Shelly Moy M. Regan ENG 122 AL October 10, 2002″Painting a Portrait of Death ” Death is inevitable to all forms of life. In giving birth to a typical family, Flannery O’Connor immediately sets the tone for their deaths, in the story, A Good Man is Hard To Find. O’Connor’s play on words, symbolism and foreshadowing slowly paves the way for the family’s death. O’Connor begins to paint the image of death with her presentation of the grandmother.
As the family prepares for their adventure the grandmother carefully selects her attire. “A navy blue straw sailor hat with a bunch of white violets on the brim and a navy blue dress with a small white dot in the print. Her collars and cuffs were white organdy trimmed with lace and at her neckline she had pinned a purple spray of cloth violets containing a sachet” (O’Connor 267).
The imagery of the grandmother’s impeccable attire foreshadows her position at the end of the story. When a person dies it is common that they are adorn in their best outfit. The grandmother has symbolically prepared herself for her eternal rest in a coffin as she is dressed in her Sunday best.
O’Connor continues to incorporate the theme of death into the story, as she provides the readers with the reason for the grandmother’s ensemble, “in cares of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once she was a lady” (O’Connor 267).
The Essay on Times The Grandmother Family Misfit Story
Eating breakfast and reading the paper, a southern family is preparing to depart for their vacation to Florida. Set in northern Georgia in the mid 1950 s, on a summer day (the children are at home, so it is a good possibility they are out of school for their summer break) when conflict begins to set in over the planned final destination of a vacation. The setting eventually progresses to a dirt ...
Symbolically the grandmother is walking down the path of death. MOY 2 As the family travels closer to death, O’Connor creates an intense setting, foreshadowing the family’s future. As the family continues to drive towards their final destination, “They passed a large cotton field with five or six graves fenced in the middle of it, like a small island” (O’Connor 268).
O’Connor purposely places “five or six” graves in that area to symbolize each of the family members. This scene foreshadows that all of the family members are put to death in a completely isolated area, surrounded by the thickness of nothing. The grandmother tells the family, “That was the old family burying ground. That belonged to the plantation” (O’Connor 268).
Not only does her quote symbolize that their whole family will soon lay their, but it allows the son to inquire, “Were’s the plantation” (O’Connor 268).
The grandmother responds, “Gone With the Wind” (O’Connor 268), this symbolically representing each of the family members at the end of the story as their souls have been let loose and set free like the wind. By illustrating play on words, O’Connor continues to maintain the trend of death. The town where the family meets their fate is brilliantly noted, Toombsboro” (O’Connor 270).
Two deadly words are excreted from the town’s name, tomb and bury. The meaning of the town enhances a foreshadowing quote from the misfit. The grandmother asks, “What did you do to get sent to the penitentiary that first time?” (O’Connor 276).
The Misfit’s answer slyly enhances the meaning of the town’s name by explaining, “Turn to the right, it was a wall… Turn to the left it was a wall. Look up at the ceiling, look down it was a floor” (O’Connor 276).
This statement continues to foreshadow the family’s death as the Misfit is symbolically describing the grave or tomb in which they will finally end up. The name of the town, “Toombsboro” (O’Connor 270) foreshadows the family’s final setting. MOY 3 The misfit himself uniquely uses imagery to illustrate death.
Before any of the family members meet their final fates, the misfit remarks, “Ain’t a cloud in the sky… Don’t see no sun but don’t see no cloud neither” (O’Connor 274).
The Essay on O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and Faulkner’s “Barn Burning”
I chose to write a comparison essay on Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and William Faulkner’s “Barn Burning”. Both of these stories share central characters with similar personalities as well as similar themes and conflicts through the stories. The Grandmother, in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”, is an old woman with old-fashioned ...
This depicts a picture of no hope. With an empty sky, the family is surrounded by complete nothingness; everything fails to appear hopeful, as everything is completely empty of possibility. The woods became the family’s final resting place. They are described as “tall and dark and deep” (O’Connor 272), like a grave.
Later on in the story the “woods gaped like a dark open mouth” O’Connor 273) frighteningly ready to swallow them. After Bailey and his son are murdered “she could hear the wind move through the treetops like a long in suck of breath,” (O’Connor 274), much like the last breath of a dying man. O’Connor uses various literary devices to foreshadow the family’s death. The story opens with the family reading about an escaped criminal as if the newspaper is foretelling their future.
Later on it is a dirt road that brings them to the tall, dark deep woods and their eternal end. Through the use of symbolism and foreshadowing O’Connor slowly paints the portrait of death that the unsuspecting family inevitably faces. MOY 4 WORKS CITE DO ” Connor, Flannery. “A Good Man is Hard To Find.” Literature Reading, Reacting, Writing.
Kirshner, Laurie. Mandell Stephen. 4 th edition. Sea Harbor: Harcourt College Publishers. 2001. 2666-278.
