A Good Man Is Hard to Find

Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" is an extremely ironic story. She puts in many details throughout the story that later on you realize she was trying to foreshadow and be ironic. I found it ironic that the grandmother wanted to go to Tennessee instead of Florida and the entire outcome of the story was because the grandmother gave directions to an abandoned house that was really in Tennessee. If the grandmother would have remembered the where the house was, the family would have never been killed. The grandmother is such a funny character regardless because she always has something to say. This is ironic because her talkative behavior is what in the end gets her killed. The Misfit even says, "She would have been a good woman if it had been somebody to shoot her every minute of her life" (914). The grandmother isn't a bad woman, she is just extremely opinionated and frankly annoys everyone else in her life. Her only son even ignored her and made faces when she talked. The children in this story are also funny. They say exactly what is on their mind, most of it extremely rude. This is ironic because the grandmother complains about the way the children act, but people could say similar things about her. The son's name "John Wesley" is also ironic because he was a priest in the 1700s who started the Methodist beliefs. I'm not sure if O'Connor did this on purpose, but if she did it would be ironic because he was such a holy man and this boy is a rude and blunt child. One thing I found interesting about this story was that they always referred to the mother as "the children's mother" and not by her name. Everyone else in the story had a name besides her so I found it strange she did not.