In her essay "The Grotesque in Southern Fiction," Flannery O'Connor writes about a reader who was not edified by the author's stories. She responds, "I think that if her heart had been in the right place, it would have been lifted up" (Collected Works 819). O'Connor seems to be trying, in her fiction, not so much to "lift up" the hearts of readers who see little that is inspirational or edifying as to put those hearts "in the right place." In many of her stories, O'Connor presents her readers with characters whose working definitions of goodness are self-centered. However, these characters encounter God, the source of true goodness, and find their definitions violently challenged and their hearts, which had been set on themselves, changed.

O'Connor worked from a definition of the word goodness that was not uniquely her own, and yet cannot be said to have been borrowed from only one source. However, one of the most apparent places where her worldview, and therefore the place where her fiction originates, is in the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, chiefly his Summa Theologica. Aquinas claims that in one sense, only God can be considered good because only God is perfect: "God alone is good essentially. For everything is called good according to its own perfection" (53). He also states that all things have a semblance of goodness in them because God is the creator of all things and his essence is within his creation (54). A thing is said to be good or evil depending upon how much being it has, that is, "inasmuch as it participates in the first being [God] by way of a certain assimilation, although distantly and defectively" (55). Readers should note that for O'Connor, as with Aquinas, goodness can be spread from creature to creature, but its source is God: "Hence it is called good because by it something is good, and not because it itself has some other goodness whereby it is good" (54).

O'Connor's characters often think of themselves as good, but are not so because that "goodness" has little or nothing to do with the goodness of God. The grandmother in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" defines goodness in terms of her personal vision of Southern manners and by her self-motivation. Ruby Turpin, of "Revelation," thinks that her goodness lies in what God has made her, white and middle class. She believes Jesus has personally bestowed this "blessing" on her, but she has used her own measuring stick and not Christ's to determine who is "good" and who is not. Most of the main characters of "The Displaced Person" have definitions of goodness that center on themselves rather than any first being. Having built the farm herself, Mrs. McIntyre weighs others on a scale that only includes the well-being of the farm. Mrs. Shortley sees people within her megalomaniacal vision, one that puts her at the center of the universe. Her husband believes his deeds justify his behavior as a loafer early in the story and later as a murderer.

"A Good Man Is Hard to Find" is one of O'Connor's finest stories and one of her most disturbing. The central character, a manipulative grandmother that many readers feel they know personally, is ruthlessly murdered with her innocent family by a man dedicated to evil. However, beneath the sweet demeanor of the old woman lies the heart of an evil perhaps more insidious to O'Connor than the obvious "badness" of The Misfit. This demonstration of calling evil good serves as a paradigm for O'Connor's worldview.

The first sentences of the story reveal that the grandmother considers her will to be obeyed above all others: "The grandmother didn't want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of their connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey's mind" (137). Rather than a kindly old woman, whose gentleness and wisdom is appreciated by all, O'Connor's protagonist is more like a spoiled child who cannot see beyond the gratification of her own desires.

Control is also very important to the grandmother. She must be in control of every situation, every conversation. She cannot stand to be left alone. As June Star remarks, "She wouldn't stay at home for a million bucks. . . . Afraid she'd miss something. She has to go everywhere we go" (137). If she stayed at home, she would not be the center of attention, and could not get what she wants: to convince Bailey to take the trip to Tennessee instead of Florida.

At the end of the story, the grandmother is faced with two facts: that she is going to die and that nothing she says--no pious phrase, no crafty remark--will save her. She is finally aware that she has lost control, and that perhaps she never had it. At this point, O'Connor feels, grace can more easily be encountered. As Baumgaertner writes,

The grandmother is not just shallow and selfish. She is clearly proud. But that pride, though destructive, manifests itself in ways that seem quite acceptable to the society in which she lives and also to many readers of O'Connor's fiction. Even her family does not act as if her selfishness is "wrong," but rather a nuisance. Moreover, the man at the diner seems to feel that he and she share the suffering of the world as they agree with the cliché "a good man is hard to find." Richard Giannone, in his book Flannery O'Connor and the Mystery of Love, writes:

For the grandmother, a "sunny disposition" is quite important. She, like Mrs. Turpin, is happy to settle for interaction which stays superficial. Twice the grandmother tells someone that he is good, both times without a basis for the judgment. The first time is during her insipid discussion with Red Sammy. The belabored mechanic/restaura-teur enters the room and says that once he let some boys charge their gas. When he asks why he would do such a thing, when no one can be trusted, the grandmother replies, "'Because you are a good man!'" (142) though she has no reason to believe her own assertion. In fact, Red Sammy and his place are little what they are advertised to be. The signs on the highway read, "RED SAM! THE FAT BOY WITH THE HAPPY LAUGH" (140), but Sam is rather dour. The grandmother notes later that Bailey does not have "a sunny disposition like she did" (141), but does not seem to recognize a lack of boisterousness as bad when thinking of Red Sam.

Red Sam's wife, who certainly knows Sam better than the grandmother, does not appear to think he is a good man. At least he is not to be relied on: "'It isn't a soul in this green world of God's that you can trust,' she said. 'And I don't count nobody out of that, not nobody,' she repeated, looking at Red Sammy" (142).

The second time that the grandmother calls someone a good man is during her conversation with The Misfit. One might infer that she is only trying to manipulate her killer in order to save her life. The basis she has is not one that can make The Misfit good. "You don't look a bit like you have common blood. I know you must come from nice people!" (147), she tells her assailant. At this point, she has not learned that goodness is not judged on what one looks like or what family one comes from.

Brinkmeyer claims that The Misfit is O'Connor's "most noteworthy religious rebel" (160). The Misfit notes that "'Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead . . . and He should not have done it. He thown everything off balance. If He did what he said, then it is nothing for you to do but follow him'" (152). But the Misfit chooses to believe that Christ did not raise the dead. So The Misfit lives for his own pleasure, and he tells the grandmother, "'No pleasure but meanness'" (152). As Brinkmeyer writes,

The Misfit has wagered on the wrong side of Pascal's coin and lost (Cobb 195). Unlike the grandmother, who believes in God but has imposed her own vision of goodness upon that belief, The Misfit has rightly affirmed that he is not a good man (148), and he chooses to act as though he does not believe in God because the punishment he has received for his crimes does not add up in his mind. As Joann Cobb writes, "The Misfit asserts his human freedom by his will to live according to his choice" (194). The Misfit, like the grandmother, is a person who again wishes to impose himself onto a definition of goodness. He desires salvation only on terms that he defines. He realizes, however, that he cannot have such, and so he tries to find some kind of pleasure, pleasure which attempts to defy a definition of goodness he cannot accept.

The Misfit feels that all, including God, have been unfair to him. In fact, this character gives voice to a number of objections that many have in accepting O'Connor's God, whose idea of goodness often escapes them. He is willing to admit that evidence of his crimes exists, but he cannot believe that he has committed them. "'They had the papers on me,'" he tells the grandmother when she suggests that he was incarcerated by mistake (150). The Misfit suggests that a legal document proved him guilty and that, because of it, the state had the right to put him in jail. But he denies that he committed the crime he has been accused of: "'It was a head-doctor at the penitentiary said what I had done was kill my daddy but I known that for a lie'" (150). Thus, by the standards of others, he recognizes he is not good, but he will not accept that he has not lived up to those standards. That is, he will not admit that his punishment does indeed fit his crimes.

For The Misfit, the idea of punishment is key to understanding his concept of goodness, which is not a matter of avoiding evil and embracing purity, but a matter of justice. He affirms Paul's maxim, "All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23), but denies that his propensity to sin and the result of condemnation is fair. First he tells the grandmother, "I found out that the crime don't matter. You can do one thing or you can do another, kill a man or take a tire off his car, because sooner or later you're going to forget what it was you done and just be punished for it" (150). Then he explains why he calls himself The Misfit: ". . . I can't make what all I done wrong fit what all I gone through in punishment" (151). Thus, he admits he is a sinner, but rejects the imprisonment, both physical and spiritual, which results.

A telling scene follows. Just as the mother and June Star are killed by The Misfit's henchmen, he asks, "Does it seem right to you, lady, that one is punished a heap and another ain't punished at all?" (151). The Misfit punishes all of them for knowing who he is, not truly a crime, but his way of attempting to restore the balance that he believes Christ's resurrection disturbed (152). Ironically,

The connection between Sammy and The Misfit may not seem important since, in societal terms, Red Sam is "good." However, that both are called "good" does connect them. The Misfit is obviously evil, while Sammy might be construed as a harmless, if somewhat sour person. But the grandmother's willingness to call both men good reveals her inability to distinguish what is good. If evil is in Sammy, and his connection to The Misfit implies as much, then one can perhaps draw the same conclusion about the grandmother.

After teaching with the parable of the sower, Jesus's disciples questioned him. The response was, "Don't you understand this parable? How then will you understand any parable" (Mark 4:13-14). As Jesus expected his disciples to have discernment concerning the application of worldly things to spiritual matters, the grandmother should be expected to understand the way fear works, especially since she considers herself good and knowledgeable about human behavior. But the grandmother, like the disciples, is void of true understanding, because, O'Connor indicates, she has not yet encountered the reality either of Christ or of real evil. She cannot possibly understand evil in others because she cannot understand it in herself.

Not until the end of the story can the grandmother understand her need for redemption. When she is faced with her own mortality, she understands that her morality is lacking. The Misfit's statement, "'She would have been a good woman . . . if there had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life'" (153) is telling. Carol Shloss writes, "The implication is clearly that consciousness of mortality is the essential prerequisite for virtue" (7).

The grandmother's discussion with the children at the beginning of the story reveals that she does not understand death. For her, death is a vague concept. She threatens John Wesley not with the thought of death, but the threat of violence. She has no rebuttal to his naive response, perhaps because her understanding of both death and violence is naive also, until she comes face to face with both. As Ruthan Knechel Johansen writes,

Readers may question the goodness of a God who allows an innocent family to be murdered by a psychopath. Yet that question limits what can be considered goodness only to human terms, much as the grandmother and The Misfit do. For her, the notion of goodness is one that fits neatly within the scope of her constructions. For him, goodness is understood in terms of man-made justice. But God is not bound by their definitions or those of O'Connor's readers. O'Connor shows that God, the source of true goodness, allows the grandmother to suffer so because her pride in herself is so deep that mere words (and to her, words have little importance) cannot root it out. She must truly lose her life to find it because the soul is more important than the body.

According to Sister Kathleen Feeley, O'Connor told an interviewer in 1963, "'Death has always been brother to my imagination. I can't imagine a story that doesn't properly end in it or in its foreshadowings'" (87). Feeley also remarks that when O'Connor realized in 1951 that she had lupus, "she knew that her feet were set on the road which she had watched her father travel to his premature death" (87). In fact, O'Connor seems to see life in terms of death. In her "Introduction to A Memoir of Mary Ann," she writes: "The creative action of the Christian's life is to prepare his death in Christ" (828).

The phrase "a good man is hard to find" is more than a pious cliché for the grandmother by the end of the story. Many reasons exist for the "hardness" of the search. One is that she has not really searched, except to come up with criteria from herself, and this search takes no effort. Second, she must come face to face with death to realize the grace that has been offered to her. In addition, through her impending death (which is hard for both her and the readers of the story), she comes to realize that she is not in control.

The Christian God that The Misfit rejects and which the grandmother does not understand is for O'Connor the source of goodness which encounters each of them. The Misfit, much like Hazel Motes in Wise Blood, chooses an absurd position because the loss of what he considers freedom is too great. In the grandmother, O'Connor shows that even a "sweet old lady" can have evil within that needs purging.