How would you respond to a reader who complained, “The title of this story is just an obvious platitude”?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

At first glance, the title may appear to be a platitude, but a careful reading of the story proves that it is much more than that. A story’s title is often a way to draw a reader into the plot, setting, or characters, but here O’Connor uses the phrase with much irony. From the title alone, students may be tempted to assume the story follows a “single-woman-can’t-find-a-man-to-marry” or “married-woman-discovers-her-husband-is-cheating” plot. Of course, nothing could be farther from the truth.
A full appreciation of the title hinges on students’ understanding of at least two issues. First, what does it mean to be “a good man” from the Southern perspective, and second, what does it mean to be a “good man” from a Christian perspective? From a midcentury Southern point of view, a good man comes from a “good family” and is wellmannered. The grandmother wants to believe The Misfit really is such a man, coming from good blood and with a good name. “‘Listen,’ the grandmother almost screamed, ‘I know you’re a good man. You don’t look a bit like you have common blood. I know you must come from nice people!’” (par. 88). O’Connor shows the irony of this assessment, when The Misfit and his gang show good manners to the women, although they are about to kill them. “The children’s mother had begun to make heaving noises as if she couldn’t get her breath. ‘Lady,’ he asked, ‘would you and that little girl like to step off yonder with Bobby Lee and Hiram and join your husband?’” (par. 124).
Keep in mind that O’Connor, as a devout Catholic who lived in the largely Protestant “Bible Belt” South, would have strong opinions about what it means to be a “good man” or a “good woman” from a spiritual perspective. You might ask your students to write about what their religious tradition—or their lack of—proposes about what it means to be “good,” and whether or not this view is upheld or undermined in the story.
For O’Connor’s own reading of this famous story, see her critical comments following the stories in this chapter. Her interpretation will certainly startle many students reading the story for the first time. If you choose to consider O’Connor’s comments in class, it may be worth asking how authoritative a writer’s interpretation of her own work is. Are there limitations or inherent biases in a writer’s selfassessment? According to the intentional fallacy, we cannot uncritically accept an author’s statement of intended meaning, because the author is unable to see his or her own work objectively. An author necessarily sees the finished work through the veil of the original intent, with the possibility of projecting onto the text meanings that were intended but that have not been realized and therefore are not communicated to any other reader through the text itself. Still, knowing an author’s conscious intentions may help point a reader in the right direction—at least in general terms.
In an incisive essay on Flannery O’Connor, Clara Claiborne Park points out that while O’Connor may have objected to readers’ attempts to reduce her stories to literal meanings or themes, she herself tended to do so in her own commentaries on the stories. Despite their excellence, the stories, when so reduced, may be faulted as oversimplified fables of Christian salvation through suffering. “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” seems vulnerable to this charge. Park observes: “As incursions of grace through arson and through murder and through sudden stroke become familiar to the point of predictability, all moral ambiguity evaporates, leaving the stories that puzzled us all too clear” (Rejoining the Common Reader, Chicago: Northwestern UP, 1991). A question for class discussion is: Can O’Connor be defended against this charge? (Perhaps she intends no ambiguity.) Evidence of the story’s depth and complexity can be found in a volume containing critical essays by various hands, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, edited by Frederick Asals (in the series “Women Writers: Texts and Contexts,” New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1993).