by Vanessa Breedlove

Created on: January 21, 2009

To The Edge of Irony & Back
"the brilliant red clay banks slightly streaked with purple; and the various crops that made rows of green lace-work on the ground."
A Good Man is Hard to Find
Flannery O'Connor
1955
"Mary Flannery O'Connor utilizes the literary devices of irony (dramatic, situational, and verbal) and foreshadowing in her short story A Good Man is Hard to Find' to convey and emphasize the concepts that we each experience reality, however skewed, through the unique, sometimes morally-distorted lens of individual perception. And occasionally we find salvation from such blindness, though we often pay the ultimate price for such clarity - life itself." (Sloan 118). "A Good Man is Hard to Find" is a powerfully ironic short story of a family vacation gone completely wrong. O'Connor uses irony as her main technique to tell the story to us. The main character in this ironic story is the nameless grandmother. Another main character is the grandmothers' son, Bailey, whose main importance is his relationship to the people around him. The story gets its start when the grandmother tries to convince the family to cancel their road trip to Florida, because of a serial killer, The Misfit, who is loose and on the run in the south. Everyone ignores the grandmother, and in an ironic twist of fate Bailey agrees to take a fatal detour. On this detour the cat the grandmother secretly brought attacks Bailey, causing them to get into an accident. Shortly after the accident the family has a "deadly" encounter with The Misfit, the very same criminal the grandmother ironically mentioned to being with. O'Connor's story is full of ironic situations which we will pin point and analyze.

The first irony we encounter is how O'Connor decided to leave the mother and grandmother unnamed. Leaving these characters without names taints our opinion, as readers, of them. Are we supposed to see them as just any old run of the mill woman? Or is O'Connor trying to make deeper statement about the women of the South, and the wear and tear on society is going through. When she shows us the difference using the image of the "the children's mother [who] still had on slacksand her head tied up in a green kerchief" with that of the grandmother's whose "collars and cuffs were white organdy trimmed with lace and at her neckline she had pinned a purple spray of cloth violets containing a sachet."; we see that neither is what we envision women to be like. The fact that these characters nails the point

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