Flannery O'Connor can seem at one time cold and calm, as well as almost ridiculously stark and aggressive. Her short stories routinely end in awful, freak fatalities or, at the very least, a character's moving devastation. Working his way during "Green leaf," "Everything that Rises Must Converge," or "A Good Man is Hard to Find," the new reader experience an existential hollowness evocative of Camus' The Stranger; O'Connor's thoughts appears a barren, godless plane of worthlessness, punctuated by pockets of arbitrary, mindless brutality.

In actuality, her writing is filled with connotation and representation, hidden in plain sight under a seamless narrative approach that breathes not a sound of outline, of dogma, or of personal belief. In this way, her writing is essentially obscure, in that it contains knowledge that is concealed to all but those who have been instructed as to how and where to look for it, i.e. the initiated. Flannery O'Connor is a Christian writer, and her work is message-oriented, yet she is far too luminous a stylist to tip her hand; like all superior writers, insensitive didacticism is repugnant to her. Nevertheless, she achieves what no Christian writer has ever achieved: a type of script that stands up on both fictional and the religious grounds, and thrives in doing impartiality to both. In this study, we will be looking at just how Flannery O'Connor proficient this seemingly unattainable task, non-didactic Christian fiction, by exploratory elements of faith, rudiments of style, and thematic elements in her writing. While secondary sources are incorporated for viewpoint.

Flannery O'Connor remained a pious Catholic all over, and this fact, coupled with the regular awareness of her own imminent death, both filtered in the course of an acute fictional sensibility, gives us precious insight into just what went into those thirty-two short stories as well as the two novels: cathartic bitterness, a conviction in grace as incredible devastating to the recipient, a gelid notion of salvation, and violence as a strength for good.

A Good Man Is Hard to Find
The story begins through the typical nuclear family being confronted by the grandmother who doesn't desire to take the holiday to Florida. She has read about a crazed killer by the name of the eccentric who is on the run heading for Florida. Unfortunately, she is unnoticed by every member of the family excluding for the little girl June Star who can read the grandmother like a book. The morning of the trip the grandmother is paradoxically dressed in her Sunday best and the first one in the car prepared to travel as June Star predicted she would be. Notice the grandmother's dress is incredibly nice for a trip she was disgusted to take only a day earlier. This is the first of O'Connor's efforts to knock the superficial ness of southern culture. The grandmother was adorned in white gloves and a navy blue dress with corresponding hat for the sole reason of being recognized as a lady in case someone saw her dead on the highway. This reason may seem ridiculous to anyone who is foreign to southern culture, but I can swear you there are abundance of women who still pledge to this way of thinking. The reader is now clued into the grandmother's trivial thoughts of death. In the grandmother's mind, her clothing provision averts any misgivings about her status as a lady. But as the Misfit later points out, there never was a body that gave the undertaker a tip.

As the trip movems, the children disclose themselves as brats, even though funny ones, mostly out of O'Connor's wish to exemplify the lost respect for the family, and elders. The reader must notice when the family passes by a cotton field, five or six graves are exposed, and perhaps prophecy what is later to come. Some motivating dialogue takes place when John Wesley asks, "Where's the plantation", and the grandmother replies, "Gone With the Wind." This is perhaps an additional statement by O'Connor at the go kaput of the family and the ensuing absence of respect and admiration for the family unit illustrated by the two children. Approximately this time, June Star and her brother begin slapping each other and the grandmother keeps the stillness by telling them a story of a black child erroneously eating her watermelon with initials from a suitor engraved in it reading E.A.T. Now here is where I think several of the reviewers are erroneous on the grandmother's character. They assert her story was racially aggravated as well as her observation made about the "pickaninny" on the side of the road. I have read reviews’ saying that the grandmother is a chauvinistic; but I think it is significant to make the peculiarity between a racist and a good-hearted impolite white woman. In order for her observation to be racist, there must be a number of intent to malign blacks present-which there isn't. When O'Connor interpreted this story, she told of a teacher she ran into whom indomitable that the grandmother was iniquity, but that his southern students resisted his explanation. The teacher didn't comprehend why and O'Connor clarify to him that the students resisted for the reason that,
 

The family’s come across with Red Sammy Butts serves as another vent for O'Connor to articulate how belief and esteem have begun to wear away. The reader should note the name of the town "Toombsboro" which the family passes in the course of. It is then the grandmother makes the fault of telling the children about a house with covert panels that is nearby. The children shout until Bailey concedes to stopover the house. But the newspaper obscuring the cat moves causing Pitty Sing to stagger on Bailey's shoulder resulting in the car being upturned. Just as all and sundry is getting their bearings, a car gradually approaches enlightening three men. When the men get out of their car, the grandmother distinguishes the Misfit at once. Right away he reveals himself to be courteous and sociable and even apologizes to the grandmother for Bailey's impoliteness to her.
But he also doesn't squander any time as he asks one of his associates to escort Bailey and John Wesley off into the woods to convene their fate.

Now here is where the fun part begins. The grandmother and the Misfit slot in a conversation, which is supposed to express a message, which I believe no one person besides O'Connor will ever completely recognize. At this point in the story, the reader should examine what he knows of the grandmother's personality thus far. She will show to be no match for the Misfit's quick wits. Subsequent to the grandmother tries to petition to the Misfit by stating that he isn't a bit common, he goes into a account about his family and how he was the category of child to question everything. At every request by the grandmother, he talks regarding different periods of his criminal life. Nothing she has said up until this point has affected him. The Misfit's terse responses to the grandmother's prayer advice reveal that these two individuals are on two very different levels with concern to religion. The Misfit has a much deeper considerate of religion and his belief system than does the grandmother. O'Connor likens him to a prophet gone wrong. I prefer to liken him to the character of Kurtz in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness."

Both of the men have the likely for greatness but as the result of seeing mankind at their worse, they have turn into jaded to individual suffering. As the two continue in discussion, the Misfit asks the grandmother if it seems right that Jesus was punished and he has fugitive punishment. The grandmother responds in the merely way she knows how to by clinging to her shallow beliefs about good blood and behaving as a gentleman would. She has a partial considerate of religion and cannot even begin to connect with the Misfit who by now has vanished off on an invective about how Jesus' raising of the dead threw the world off poise. But then the grandmother observes the Misfit as he was regarding to cry. She reaches out to him as well as remarks, "Why you're one of my babies. You're one of my own children." The Misfit, who is clearly affected, rears back and spurt her three times.

I think O'Connor clarify it the best when she writes, “The Grandmother is at last alone, facing the Misfit. Her head clears for an instant and she realizes, even in her limited way, that she is responsible for the man before her and joined to him by ties of kinship, which have her roots deep in the mystery, she has been merely prattling about so far. And at this point, she does the right thing, makes the right gesture..." [O'Connor, Flannery, 1955].
 

It is a jump of faith we have to take, however we desire to word it, whatever sacred or religious thought we wish to use. And eventually, what the Misfit sees and ultimately the grandmother as well is that when we live in a world where the devout and religious creed of yesterday are no match for the methodical, coldly observation-based and unprincipled context of the contemporary world, and when there are no other sufficient answers to this question of how to put higher metaphysical value on human life, we are left with nothing but what we can see approximately us, and we have no means with which to respond the animal violence of somebody like the Misfit. His aggravation in not being there to see whether or not Jesus actually did exemplify the metaphysical is the deep aggravation and sense of loss that the modern world feels in not having Proof, in not having great sufficient with which to move toward these questions in the face of cold science and scrutiny, and in being asked to carry out the quaint, somewhat silly act of merely putting faith in something we cannot see with our own eyes. When the grandmother faces him for the final time and makes one ultimate attempt to answer him, the senselessness of this is verified starkly, callously, and with all the animal aggression and desolation and nihilism inevitable in such a world.

In the end, O'Connor is putting to us the similar troubling question the Misfit puts to the grandmother: how do we answer this nihilism in a way that makes intellect within the circumstance of the modern world? Judging by the state of affairs, I'd say we at rest have not come up with whatever things much enhanced than the grandmother’s disgraceful response, and our society and world have the shotgun wounds to establish it.

He is making comprehensible that there was a time when he was good when he still did concern sufficient to ask the questions that matter that make us human. But someplace along the way, something happened, and he misplaced that and became what he is today not essentially a good man, not essentially a bad man just an amoral man, and that is the pits kind of man of all, as that is not so much a man as an animal, with no sense of worth for human life and no opportunity for salvation. The chat between the grandmother and the Misfit gets the grandmother to the summit where she can see and recognize the exploit of grace in her own life and expand it to another. The Misfit gets her to the place where she can be a good woman, making him in a sense a good man. I think a more clear foreshadowing of the family's future than the cemetery is the explanation of the grandmother's dress. She dresses so that any person verdict her dead on the side of the road would know she is a lady.

Other Short Stories
In finale, Flannery O’Connor uses burly imagery to prefigure to her readers the inevitable ending of "A Good Man Is Hard To Find and other stories." She first provides her readers and suspicion of the ending by mentioning the Misfit’s fatal tendencies, peaking her reader’s inquisitiveness. She then uses frequent images such as the grandmother’s dress, the cemetery, and the discussion with the Misfit to further feed our inquisitiveness. Her revelation images are both strong and incomprehensible, so as not to spoil the astonishing ending of the story.
 

References

Friedman, Melvin J. and Lawson, Lewis A., Eds., The Added Dimension: The Art and Mind of Flannery O'Connor, New York, Fordham University Press, 1977.

 
Muller, Gilbert H., Nightmares and Visions: Flannery O'Connor and the Catholic Grotesque, Athens, GA, University of Georgia Press, 1972.
 

O'Connor, Flannery, A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories, Orlando, FL, Harcourt, Brace, Jovanoivch, 1955.
 

Asals, Frederick. Flannery O'Connor: The Imagination of Extremity. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1982.
 

Bacon, Jon Lance. Flannery O'Connor and Cold War Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
 

Balazy, Teresa. Structural Patterns in Flannery O'Connor's Fiction. Polska Akademia Nauk, Oddzial W Poznaniu, Warzawa - Poznan, 1982.