# of Words: 428

It is somewhat hard to know how to present a story as totally polarizing as "A great Man is Hard to discover." Many people today think that it's a cynical story, uncompromising in the way it brings out human pettiness and manipulation. Others think it's a uproarious black humor--such as a movie by the Coen Bros or some twisted R.

Crumb comicbook.
Still others think that it's an uplifting depiction of the mystical ways God works through human beings over and over their own wills.
However you decide to specify "A great Man Is difficult To Find"--and we generally define it as "all of the above"--odds are fairly good that you're going to be discounted (or should we say scarred?)

The set up: a household (dotty grandma, bratty children, mad cat) embark on a road trip to Florida. Additionally, the grownups are somewhat nervous--and also a bit titillated--to know that a dangerous murderer named The Misfit has escaped from the penitentiary and can also be headed to the Sunshine State.

We are not going to give you all of the details about what happens when the family gets dropped on a disused back road...however we can let you know that it's frankly disturbing.

The naysayers discovered them consistently grotesque in their depiction of debased, gruesome (and generally unsympathetic) characters along with their glorious displays of violence or cruelty. "A great Man is tough to Find"--that can be O'Connor's most popular story--often stood in the middle of discussion.
O'Connor, however, saw all of her fiction--such as this story--as realistic, demandingly unsentimental, but ultimately optimistic. Her inspiration as a writer came out of a deeply felt faith in Roman Catholicism, which she maintained informed all of her stories.

A recurrent theme during her writings was the action of divine grace from the horribly dumb, often revolting, and normally funny universe of human beings. And this theme is out in force in "A great Man is Hard to discover."

This story affords possibly the best place to start in researching the work of O'Connor--after all, it was the 1955 collection A Good Man is tough to Find and Other Stories that created Flannery O'Connor as a significant voice in American literature, plus a contemporary master of the brief story.

Can you despise it? That is as difficult to say as a fantastic person is to locate--it really depends on your worldview and the strength of your stomach.

However, what's not impossible to determine is this truth: you're not going to forget "A great Person To Locate" anytime soon.

Related Papers

Emma Jane Austen

Published in 1815, Emma was written in the height of Jane Austen's popularity. The Prince Regent, George, did Austen the "favor" of allowing her to devote Emma to him. Austen likely wasn't so excited about the possibility of dedicating her novel to a man who was, by all accounts, dissipated, drunk, and superficial. George set the standards of "gentlemanlike" behavior during his time. According to him, fashionable men were dandies -- the kind who would ride sixteen miles to London only to get a......Read More

Cloud 9 Caryl Churchill

We may as well tell you: Cloud 9 is the most bizarre, most uptight play we have ever read. Seriously, who may even stay awake through a play that concerns itself with a massive incestuous orgy at the center of a London park, a game of hide-and-seek in Victorian Colonial Africa which segues into adultery and pedophilia, masturbating grandmothers, a fairly slick necrophilia-themed pickup lineup, along with a sexually frustrated ghost who wishes to have an orgy... with his lesbian sister. What is......Read More

David Copperfield Charles Dickens

Dickens's fiction appeared frequently from the popular journals of the day, such as Bentley's Miscellany along with his own periodical, Household Words (which conducted in 1850 to 1859). From 1850, at the age of 38, Dickens had established himself as a real literary celebrity (possibly along the lines of today's J.K. Rowling). Really, such as J.K. Rowling, Dickens's key claim to fame is twofold: first, '' he writes enduring characters which everyone remembers -- and we expect that, after......Read More

Related Topics