A Good Grandmother is Hard to Find in O'Connor's Short Story

 

    The first time I read Flannery O'Connor was last year in my southern literature class. We did read ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’, and the character of the grandmother is rather comic. She is one of those characters who annoys everyone else and is also rather selfish. When the family first gets into a car accident her main concern is herself and her cat, and she is not particularly worried about anyone else. The family is then approached by three men, one of which is an escaped convict, the misfit. As the entire family is being murdered the grandmother just continues to beg for her life alone, not even attempting to save the others. I'm always surprised by the grandmother's disregard for the rest of her family as they are being murdered and her somewhat oblivious nature. She does not even seem to mourn the death of her son or her grandchildren before she herself is killed. Throughout the entire story she is just a rather annoying character, even though she is the central focus. She is also partly to blame for what happened to herself and her family as she misled them to the woods on the hunt for this house she once visited. Overall, she is a very unlikable character, and basically it got her entire family killed.