When the class was discussing Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find the question
of morality kept creeping into my thought process. We thoroughly fleshed out
what it meant to be a moral and good character within the confines of the
story. Yet, a question loomed for me, who would be considered the “good”
character when looking at the grandmother and the misfit. More so, does the
reader’s upbringing really come into play when making this choice? Personally
and it sounds terrible to write it but I would have to side with the misfit in
the argument. Although this character is a known serial killer and has the
entire family murdered in the woods, there is something about him that displays
that he knows what kind of person he is and is okay with it. The misfit is
comfortable with being honest within himself and to the outside world. On page
128, “my daddy said I was a different breed of dog from my brothers and
sisters.” It is this recognition in being different that sets the misfit apart.
Coming back to a previous point of someone’s upbringing determining how he or
she would identify goodness; my personal stance is that of a person who finds
racism to be the lowest of the low, so to speak. The grandmother identifies
herself as one of a southern “bell,” she acts higher than might in particular
to the poor and that of color. This sense of entitlement is something that
identifies the character especially when setting herself apart from the rest of
normal people. An example being when she reflects upon her past romantic
relationships, citing the reason she didn’t marry Teagarden due to the fact
that he “just brought her a watermelon on Saturday.” Also that she should have
due to the fact that he had “bought Coca-Cola stock when it first came out.”
Money again is something that the grandmother uses to set herself apart.
Another
topic that was not touched upon during class was that of the grandmother being
to blame for everything that went wrong in the context of the story itself. Without
the grandmother being present the trip wouldn’t have been planned, the house
that they tried to find wouldn’t have been there so the crash wouldn’t have
happened, and she wouldn’t have recognizesd the misfit outloud thus leading to
the eventual killing of the family. Without her, everyone would have survived
but because of her sheer existence
I have to agree completely with Sean in his argument of the Misfit serving as someone who possesses morality and logic as opposed to any other character in this short story. A rather interesting notion within this blog was the idea of people being defined by their upbringing. We see that the author recognizes this concept through the grandmother. Who was raised in an era where black people were looked down upon. Also, the children serve as another example of this concept as well. They were raised by a mother who doesn't have a relationship with the grandmother at all, considering the fact that the mother has no name in this literature. And a Father whom when he does talk to his mother, the author doesn't include in the literature because of the obscenity of what he said. So any interesting idea is that, if you are raised around these beliefs of racism and disrespect, does that make you excusable from your inherited beliefs and the cultureresponsible for it?
ReplyDeleteIn this post you claimed more that the Misfit is the good guy, but then only went on to show how the Grandmother was clearly not a good person and how, to some extent, without the Grandmother none of the misfortunes the family ran into would have happened. This is all well and good, but I would have liked to hear more of how you decided that the misfit is a good person. I personally found the entire cast of characters to be more or less devoid of any true moral goodness. They, like most of the society they were entrenched in, seem to be made of of an average of selfishness and ambivalence toward the well-being of others. I would say that the Misfit is definitely more consistent in how he acts and what he says he believes, but I would not say a consistent serial killer is in anyway better than a person like the Grandmother who fluctuates between doing good and bad by focusing more on her appearance than in trying to be consistent. To say that the Misfit is better than the Grandmother is almost like saying that the Misfit is a better person than the majority of people who made up society, and I just don't see how a serial killer could in any way be better than the average non-murderer, bigot or not.
ReplyDelete