The title of Flannery O'Connor's 1953
short story "A Good Man is Hard to Find" is the same as a very popular blues song playing on radios
and jukeboxes all over America in the 1940's and 1950's. Three lines from the chorus to that song
make it clear why O'Connor chose that song title as the title for her story:
A good man is hard to find.
You always get the other kind. . .
For a good man nowadays is hard to find.
As those song lyrics put it and as we are reminded several times in the story, a good man (or woman
or child) is indeed very hard to find. It is almost as if the characters in the story -- especially the
Grandmother and the Misfit -- were designed to illustrate John Calvin's doctrine of the total depravity
of human nature. There is so little to admire in the behavior of the characters in this story that a reader
could easily leave the story feeling that people are basically evil (or insane or too insignificant to
matter) and that it really is hard to find a good human being.
O'Connor repeatedly puts paraphrases
of the title into the mouths of various characters in the story. For example, Red Sammy Butts,the fat
redneck who owns the filling station/dance hall/barbecue restaurant where Bailey's family stops for
lunch, repeats the theme of human weakness and depravity in his very first speech: "These days you
don't know who to trust." Then the grandmother says: "People are certainly not nice like they used to
be." Red Sammy's wife chimes in next: "It isn't a soul in this green world of God's that you can
trust. . .And I don't count nobody out of that, not nobody!" In his last speech Red Sammy says it
very clearly: "A good man is hard to find." All of these comments amount to the same idea, the very
Puritanical notion that human nature is corrupt and that mankind's basic instincts incline him toward
mischief. As the Mifit puts it, "it's nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the
best way you can -- by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to
him. No pleasure but meanness."
As we progress through the story we
search in vain for admirable characters. John Wesley is a bratty little fat kid with glasses. June Star is
a bitchy little girl who sets some sort of record for rudeness. Their mother is a nonentity
whose
face was as broad and innocent as a cabbage and was tied around with a green head-kerchief that had
two points on the top like rabbit's ears.
The cabbage-rabbit's bald-headed husband Bailey is interested only in the sports pages of the
Atlanta Journal. Red Sammy is a grossly fat redneck:
His khaki trousers reached just to his hip bones and his stomach hung over them like a sack of meal
swaying under his shirt.
Hiram is a fat boy wearing a red tee-shirt with a Colt 45 ale logo. He is a slack-jawed retard whose
mouth hangs "partly open in a kind of loose grin." Bobby Lee is a sadist who thinks murdering a
family of six is "some fun." Nowhere in the story do we find characters with nobility, virtue, charity,
or goodness. This cast of characters surely goes a long way toward proving that Calvin was right
about how worthless the human race is.
It is, of course, the confrontation
between the grandmother and the Misfit which most powerfully illustrates O'Connor's negative view of
human nature. The grandmother talks to the Misfit about prayer and Jesus, and she keeps insisting
that the Misfit is really a good man:
"Listen," the grandmother almost screamed, "I know you're a good man. You don't look a bit like
you have common blood. I know you must come from nice people."
Also, the Misfit talks to the grandmother about Jesus:
Jesus was the only one that ever raised the dead. . .If he did what he said he did, then it's nothing for
you to do but throw away everything and follow him, and if he didn't, then it's nothing for you to do
but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can -- by killing somebody or burning down
his house or doing some other meanness to him.
In the end both of them reject the religious solution. The Misfit says: "I don't need no hep. . .I'm
doing alright by myself." The grandmother says: "Maybe He didn't raise the dead." Both of them are
facing the basic depravity of human nature and giving in to that depravity. Perhaps that's why the
grandmother says to the Mifit, "Why you're one of my babies. You're one of my own children." The
grandmother and the Misfit are united by one common human nature.
It seems clear, therefore, that the story
presents an almost Puritanical view of human nature. After reading it, one can almost sympathize with
Hawthorne's Goodman Brown whose life was ruined when he learned that everyone around him was
as sinful as he himself. It is always gloomy news when we discover that a good man is hard to find.