Ebsco Host in One of My Babies the Misfit and the Grandmother
Faith and Doubt in Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Human being is Difficult to Find"
Is God and religion at the center of O'Connor' them in the Georgia wilderness? Is the confrontation between the family and the Misfit meeting an "Blow," equally June Star exclaimed, or inevitable? The literary critic Owens states that the story is a not-religious metaphor for the grandmother'south "lethal manifestation of her irresolute social order [as information technology clashes with the Misfit's] cash oriented culture." Nevertheless such a non-religious argument places too little weight on the story's ascendant religious aspects. As a Christian writer, O'Connor's work is message-oriented merely does non moralize excessively. It is, at times, hard to uncover her religious symbolism or the meaning behind her grapheme's actions. She breathes not a word of agenda, dogma, or personal belief into her writing. Merely ultimately, by O'Connor'southward own admission, her stories "are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to have information technology" (Wyatt).
Grace, however, is a final judgment that happens in an instant. It is more accurate to say that "A Skillful Man is Hard to Find" is an exploration of organized religion and doubtfulness as represented only past the just significant characters in the story, the grandmother and the Misfit. They are at unlike stages in their religious journeys and although their individual faiths contrast sharply, both are marred by their human foibles. Ultimately, the grandmother and the Misfit demonstrate traits that are, to some degree, within each of usa: skepticism, uncertainty, pride, and selfishness.
The grandmother places smashing importance on exterior appearances. Her formal driving clothes provide insight into her self-epitome and her place in the world. She is frozen in her past. This is revealed by her racist comments concerning the "pickaninny" and the "nigger boy", and when she complains most modern times past declaring that "people are certainly not dainty like they used to exist" (O'Connor). Her one-time-fashioned southern antebellum mental attitude "is filled with the prejudices of her course and time" (Bandy). Prior to meeting the Misfit, further graphic symbol flaws are revealed. While she feels that the world has get less respectful, as is demonstrated by the children's mental attitude toward others, she is oblivious to her own disrespect. This too reveals her hypocrisy. The grandmother is manipulative to the point of lying. She tries unsuccessfully to get Bailey to go to Tennessee instead of Florida, hiding the cat in the car, and coercing the children to get Bailey to get to the plantation. Immediately subsequently the blow, her get-go words testify where her major business organization lies—for herself rather than for her family as she says, "I believe I accept injured an organ" (O'Connor). She never asks if anyone else is injure. Her selfishness is obvious and predictable to her own family; they display non reaction to her self-concern.
The Grandmother'south flaws mirror her shallow religious behavior. Much as she has gone through life without questioning her social status and beliefs, so she has not questioned her faith. She wears it like she wears her clothes—formal, unchanging and neat.
Seemingly, the reason that religion may be totally absent from the first one-half of the story is considering it represents the lack of thought that the grandmother has given information technology. Religion only becomes dominant in the 2d half because she needs information technology to salvage herself. First, she appeals to the Misfit by calling him a good man. When this fails she resorts to religion by asking if he prays. Organized religion becomes a weapon to disarm him, not a healing salve that it is intended to be. Withal, her attempt fails for the elementary reason that she cannot argue with him intelligently. Her continual 1-dimensional pleas to "pray" band empty to the Misfit's ears because he seeks a level of understanding that she is incapable of providing. As farther testify, when she is lone with the Misfit she finds that "she has lost her phonation . . . She wanted to tell him that he must pray . . . Finally she found herself maxim, "Jesus, Jesus" (O'Connor)—this exclamation comes out as a expletive rather than a truthful telephone call for her Savior. She digs deep within her faith to counter the Misfit's bitter philosophy and comes upwardly empty.
The family members' static characterizations serve to accent the grandmother's nature. The mother "whose face was a broad and innocent as a cabbage" (O'Connor) can be seen as defective intelligence. The grandmother seems to have more than intelligence but has non applied it to her understanding of her own faith. The children's open disrespect of others is a caricature of the grandmother's more subtle methods. The parents pay little attention to the grandmother and when they do, they are often condescending—a reflection of the grandmother'south own attitude. June Star in insults the waitress when she says, "I wouldn't alive in a broken-down place like this for a million bucks" (O'Connor). Indeed, the grandmother's ironic admonishment of June Star for this annotate demonstrates her cocky-centered nature, as she is unable to use her ain morals of proper acquit to herself.
Only as the grandmother is flawed, so are we all. O'Connor herself "found little to blame in this woman, choosing to wrap her in the comfortable mantle of elderly Southern womanhood" (Bandy). Hers is an unexamined life and this makes her the perfect foil for the Misfit.
The Misfit is a born skeptic. His Daddy said that "it'south some that can live their whole life out without request most it and information technology's others as to know why it is, and this male child is one of the latters" (O'Connor). He needs absolute proof of Jesus' validity as when he proclaims that "information technology ain't right I wasn't there because if I had of been there I would of know" (O'Connor). The Misfit appears to exist a mod-day version of the Biblical disciple, Thomas:
The other disciples therefore said unto him, We have seen the Lord.
But Thomas said unto them, Except I shall run across in his hands the print
of the Nails and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my
paw into His side, I will non believe. John 20:25 (HOLY)
The Misfit "is the only character . . . with whatever sense of what information technology means to ask morally serious questions virtually human feel" (Bonney). It is possible
that he has non questioned deep enough or has arrived at the wrong decision, merely he has certainly searched deeper than the grandmother.
Nonetheless, it takes more than a questioning nature to make a killer. In spite of the many mutual jobs that he lists, his past is surprisingly vague and contradictory. He confesses that he "done something incorrect and got sent to the penitentiary" (O'Connor). But he also states that "the head-doctors . . . said what I had done was kill my daddy just I known that for a lie" (O'Connor). He readily admits that he is a bad human. These contradictions are a device past which O'Connor prevents the reader from knowing his existent past. This enables the Misfit to conclude for himself that he "can't brand what all I done wrong fit all [he] gone through in punishment" (O'Connor) while preventing readers from making their ain judgment every bit to whether he has been treated fairly. It is irrelevant what the reader believes—information technology is what the Misfit believes that matters.
In spite of his violent lifestyle, the Misfit has non completely destroyed his organized religion. When the grandmother asks why he doesn't pray for Jesus' assistance, the Misfit replies, "I don't want no hep . . . I'm doing all right by myself" (O'Connor). This would have been a perfect opportunity for him to denounce any conventionalities. The anguish he shows when he wishes that he had been there when Jesus raised the dead is not that of someone who has turned abroad from God merely of someone defenseless in limbo—unable to accept a leap of faith. His cryptic mental country is conspicuously represented by his remark that he "don't encounter no sunday simply don't see no clouds neither" (O'Connor).
The inevitable meeting of the family and the Misfit is foreshadowed by the dramatic symbology and scenes that precede it. This can exist seen as evidence of God's mitt at work amalgam this fateful confrontation. The descriptions of the countryside during the drive provide numerous symbols of what is to come. The family graves in the cotton field foreshadow the deaths of the family unit. The remembered plantation with is oak artery and master building with six columns represents the six family members bodies deep in the woods. The copse by Stone Mountain are "full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled" (O'Connor). The gray monkey nonchalantly "catching fleas on himself and biting each one carefully between his teeth" (O'Connor) foreshadows the Misfit'south own indiscriminate murdering.
The foreshadowing and symbols combine to provide a vague, unripened malevolence that contrasts to the seemingly innocent family holiday trip. This makes the future violence that much more than shocking and unsettling. Ultimately, the grandmother'due south and the Misfit's trips are non the ones they had planned. They are both on their mode to Florida. The grandmother goes against her wishes. She would rather exist going to Tennessee. In much the same way she is shot against her wishes, making a journey that she did not desire to make. The Misfit is as much on the run from his own beliefs as he is on the run from the law. He cannot continue going forever and it is his run-in with the grandmother that may change him for the better.
In the moment before being shot, the grandmother says to the Misfit, "why you're 1 of my babies. You're one of my own children" (O'Connor). Equally she reaches toward him, all subterfuge and manipulation get out her in the terminal moment and she feels empathy for another. And what is her fate? Perhaps, equally Gary Sloan says in his article "O'Connor'southward A Good Homo is Hard to Find, "She is primed for her moment of grace, connects with the Misfit, and dies redeemed" (Sloan).
In his conversation with the grandmother, the Misfit reveals his hurting. At his weakest moment, he recoils from the grandmother's empathy and shoots her. But the seed of change has been planted. The possibility that he will take faith has been created:
Then saith he to Thomas, reach here thy finger, and behold my
hands; and accomplish hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be
not faithless, but believing. [28] And Thomas answered and said
unto him, My Lord and my God. [29] Jesus saith unto him, Thomas,
because thou has seen me, chiliad has believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and all the same accept believed. John 20:27-29 (HOLY)
Perhaps the Misfit, equally represented past the silver-white trees that sparkled in their meanness, may brainstorm to sparkle with a glimmer of beauty and goodness. The well-nigh compelling evidence of this is O'Connor's own argument, "however unlikely this may seem, the old lady's gesture, like the mustard-seed, will grow to exist a great crow-filled tree in the Misfit's center, and volition be plenty of a pain to him there to plow him into the prophet he is meant to become" (Swap). The Misfit'due south own words also hint a change. Earlier on he declared that at that place "is no pleasure but meanness" (O'Connor) but at the story's end he counteracts this with "information technology's no real pleasance in life" (O'Connor). We cannot forget the sacramental view of life that O'Connor portrays in her fiction and can therefore surmise that in that location is hope that his dubiousness will turn to faith.
O'Connor blends a carefully constructed web of symbolism, foreshadowing, and pregnant that shows an ultimate confrontation betwixt religion and doubt. At the terminate of the day, the good homo that is difficult to find is Jesus.
Works Cited
Bandy, Stephen C. "1 of My Babies': The Misfit and The Grandmother."
Studies in Short Fiction. 33 (Winter 1996). Masterfile Premeir. EBSCOHOST. CPCC Libraries, Charlotte, NC. xiv July 2003.
Bonney, William. "The Moral Structure of Flannery O'Connor's 'A Good Human being
is Difficult to Find.'" Studies in Short Fiction 27 (Summertime 1990).
Masterfile Premier. EBSCOHOST. CPCC Libraries, Charlotte, NC. 14 July 2003.
Holy Bible: King James Version. United States: Thomas Nelson Inc., 1990.
O'Connor, Flannery. "A Good Man is Hard to Find." Flannery
O'Connor: Collected Works. USA: The Library of America, 1953, 1954. 8 July 2003.
< http://xroads.virginia.edu/~DRBR/goodman.html>.
Sloan, Gary. "O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find." Explicator 57 (Winter
1999). Masterfile Premier. EBSCOHOST. CPCC Libraries, Charlotte, NC. 14 July 2003.
Wyatt, Bryan N. "The Domestic Dynamics of Flannery O'Connor'southward:
Everything That Rises Must Converge." Twentieth Century
Literature 38 (Bound 1992). Masterfile Premeir. EBSCOHOST. CPCC Libraries, Charlotte, NC. fourteen July 2003.
Source: https://englishcompandlit.com/studentdraftfaithanddoubt.html
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