Reflections of observing a self serving life - Book Report/Review Example

Flannery O'Connor's story, "A Good Man is Hard to Find" brings to light, the author's opinion that faith can blind individuals from the truth. The story is narrated by a Grandmother who travels with her family for a vacation in Florida and the eventual murder of the entire family by the Misfit, an ex-murder who the family runs into by chance.O'Connor 's use of religion in the story points to her opinions that religion can become a devious tool in the hands of those who use it only for their own selfish means.

Throughout the story, the grandmother is described as a pessimistic, selfish, and devious woman As the Misfit and his cohorts begin to murder the Grandmother's family, the Grandmother begins to plead with the Misfit, using religion as a way to try and convince the Misfit to spare her life. The Misfit sees through the Grandmother's scheme and becomes angry and shoots the Grandmother to death saying "There's no pleasure but meanness" (Gioai and Kennedy). For O'Connor, narcissism plays a large role in way that the grandmother acts and is a kind of blindness; an inability to perceive God as well as the goodness that exists in others and oneself.

Narcissism and the inability to see good in anyone other than themselves is a characteristic shared by both the Grandmother and the Misfit.Both characters fail to have any empathy for the other. Just as the Grandmother assumes that the Misfit has no Christian bone in his body, the misfit assumes that neither does she. They both see their way as the only way and never take into consideration the others perspective. "Narcissism for O'Connor has crucial ideological components. Prominent among these are divisions of race and class--many of her narcissists are deeply racist or contemptuous toward those they designate" (Elie).

Narcissism symbolizes a kind of blindness in both the Grandmother and the Misfit. It makes the Grandmother unable to see the goodness in those around her and it makes the Misfit unable to see the goodness hidden within him. The use of religion in the story reflects O'Conner's catholic background and the stereotypical catholic characters of the southern United States. In the story, O'Conner uses the Grandmother to reveal some of the inadequacies she believed plagued many Christian attitudes in the South.

The way in which the Grandmother only refers to her beliefs to try and defend herself from the misfit, stands out in stark contrast from all her other actions in the story. The reader has no idea that the Grandmother was religious until the very end of the story. Up until this point she is portrayed only as a comical, pessimistic, cantankerous and devious woman. In turn, the Misfit's opinions of religion are obvious in his response to the Grandmother's pleas when he explains that he is angry at God for not leaving any factual evidence of his existence.

Many of O'Connor's stories have characters similar to the Misfit. These characters represent a kind of evil threat placed to test a characters religious obedience. The Misfit's disbelief and anger with God is mirrored in his actions as he murders the Grandmother and her family. Long before O'Connor contracted the lupis that eventually killed her, she was struggling with godless horrors she saw in her native South. "If you live today," she wrote, "you breathe in nihilism. In or out of the Church, it's the gas you breathe.

" Spiritual and bodily calamities are closely related. Ours is the age of ashes, she discerned, because it is also the culture of death" (Wood). This thought explains why her fiction is both comical and grotesque, and why her characters and plots are both shocking and redemptive. For O'Connor, "by contrast, Christians are meant to imitate rather than replicate Christ. We are his disciples and witnesses, feasting on rather than