“A Good Man Is Hard to Find”

O’Connor’s short story, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, has many examples of being Southern grotesque. I think the story was even a little radical for the time period it was written in. It seems like this story takes place around the 1950’s when people were overall pretty conservative and old fashioned. So a story such as this one would have probably come as a shock to most people. The misfit himself can  be described as Southern grotesque because he definitely has his flaws and doesn’t act like a normal person would. He shows no sympathy for the family, but instead has an extreme personality that drives him to kill the whole family. This type of behavior by the misfit makes the reader feel both appalled at him and somewhat sorry for him because he seems to have lost his sense of reality. The misfit fits the definition of a secular grotesque in which someone will choose not to follow God and instead look to kill the soul and live for the body. The misfit shows how he has rejected God’s will when he tells the grandma that Jesus ruined everything and it’s best just to live for pleasure and do whatever you want because there is no way to know if He did what He said and died on the cross. The misfit’s form of pleasure is meanness which he carries out in killing people. This is an example of a grotesque character. The setting of the short story has aspects of being Southern grotesque as well. At the start, the family passes by a black boy and the grandma shows her racial bigotry by calling him a ‘pickaninny’ and saying that “little niggers in the country don’t have things like we do”. So, this short story has examples of being Southern grotesque in its plot and in its characters.