A Good Man is Hard to Find

Similar to "Revelation", Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find" is another religious allegory. We have an older woman who undergoes a self-realization because of an external force. Mary Grace causes Mrs. Turpin to become aware of her hypocrisy and the Misfit exposes the grandmother for her true nature. Throughout the story, the grandmother was opinionated and self-righteous, continually using Christianity and the ''good old days'' as basis for her superiority and it was not until her encounter with the Misfit that she was no longer able to hide behind her excuses. The grandmother, in her attempted reasoning with the Misfit, comes to a strange, dreamlike resolution right before he shoots her. Once his henchmen come back from the woods, they discuss her blubbering nature and the Misfit says "She would have been a good woman,...If it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life". In this statement, he is talking about how the grandmother only wanted to atone for her sins when she knew that she would be near the end of her life. Before, she would attempt to manipulate others around her to get her own way and in the end, it was this that ultimately led to her and her family's demise. Had she been honest rather than hiding the fact that their destination was in a different state, Bailey would not have continued and the family would not have been murdered. Unlike "Revelation", the magnitude of the consequences that the central character faces is much greater, teaching us that we cannot atone for our mistakes only when we know we do not have much time left.