Discussion Forum 4.2: Revision

The main focus of the story A Good Man is Hard to Find is the grandmother. The story centers around her viewpoints on different things that take place within the story. The story begins with a disagreement between the grandmother and the rest of the family. The dispute is about where to go on vacation. The grandmother wants to go to Tennessee, and the other members of the family want to head down to Florida. The grandmother is worried about a man named The Misfit, an escaped prisoner in Florida she had heard about in the paper. "Here this fellow that calls himself The Misfit is aloose from the Federal Pen and headed toward Florida and you read here what it says he did to these people. Just you read it. I wouldn't take my children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it. I couldn't answer to my conscience if I did." Despite the grandmother expressing her concerns and reading the family, the news article about The Misfit, the family chooses to ignore her fears and head on to Florida.

The second conflict that arises is a man vs. man conflict between the grandmother and her son Bailey. Another issue that comes up between them is the grandmother bringing her cat. "She had her big black valise that looked like the head of a hippopotamus in one corner, and underneath it, she was hiding a basket with Pitty Sing, the cat, in it. She didn't intend for the cat to be left alone in the house for three days because he would miss her too much and she was afraid he might brush against one of her gas burners and accidentally asphyxiate himself. Her son, Bailey, didn't like to arrive at a motel with a cat." This sparks problems within the family. Bringing the cat is just one of the many issues that the grandmother causes that leads to more conflicts in the story.

A perfect example of the grandmother causing more conflicts is the fact that the cat, Pitty Sing, will later cause the accident that leads to the family's death. "It's not much farther," the grandmother said, and just as she said it, a horrible thought came to her. The thought was so embarrassing that she turned red in the face and her eyes dilated and her feet jumped up, upsetting her valise in the corner. The instant the valise moved, the newspaper top she had over the basket under it rose with a snarl and Pitty Sing, the cat, sprang onto Bailey's shoulder. The children were thrown to the floor and their mother, clutching the baby, was thrown out the door onto the ground; the old lady was thrown into the front seat. The car turned over once and landed right-side-up in a gulch off the side of the road. Bailey remained in the driver's seat with the cat gray-striped with a broad white face and an orange nose clinging to his neck like a caterpillar. As soon as the children saw they could move their arms and legs, they scrambled out of the car, shouting, "We've had an ACCIDENT!" The grandmother was curled up under the dashboard, hoping she was injured so that Bailey's wrath would not come down on her all at once. The horrible thought she had had before the accident was that the house she had remembered so vividly was not in Georgia but in Tennessee."

Another man vs. man conflict arises between the grandmother and The Misfit. This is where the central battle begins. She has to face the Misfit, the escaped prisoner; When he confronts her with a gun, she struggles within herself to figure out what to say to save her life. The grandmother struggles to find the words to say. She kept repeating, "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!" This quote shows the hypocrisy of the grandmother; she thinks down on everyone until someone confronts her. The Misfit sees how hypocritical the woman is and decides that he is willing to kill her even though she is an older woman. Which shows he has completely lost his humanity. He kills her in the end because she annoyed him.

The grandmother did not change much over time. She started the trip off in a negative manner, and that trip and her life ended negatively. She was also judgemental. An example of this is her calling a black child a racial slur. "Little niggers in the country don't have things like we do. If I could paint, I'd paint that picture," she said." This quote is a prime example of the grandmother's mean nature. This quote also helps us to understand how vital that setting is to the story. The grandmother is a combination of all the worst parts of the south. The story is set in a period that racism was thought of as just a part of life. That is why the setting is significant to the meaning of the story.

The setting leads to the critical reading strategy that works best for this story. Which is preview, the preview reading strategy is a strategy in which the reader will research the story before reading it. Previewing allows the reader to understand the dialogue and meaning behind the innuendos better. By previewing A Good Man is Hard to Find, the reader can see that the grandmother is a southern lady. She is a lady with high standards and a strict moral code because that is how women of the south were at that time. This is a crucial component of the story because it shows why the grandmother acts the way she does. In the end, A Good Man is Hard to Find is a story about the south and the southern culture. That is why the grandmother is the main focus of the story; She is the epitome of a person of the south.

Works Cited

MEYER, MICHAEL. COMPACT BEDFORD INTRODUCTION TO LITERATURE: Reading, Thinking, and Writing. BEDFORD BKS ST MARTINS, 2019.