English 101
September 29, 2015
Death is Around the Corner
Every man’s life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguished one man from another. In Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” a family goes on a trip to Florida but the grandmother argues the whole way there that they should go to Tennessee instead. She mentions that a killer called the Misfit is on the loose. While on the road, the grandmother asks to stop at an old house. As they are going down the road they wreck, but little do they know that the Misfit is waiting around the corner to help them. O’Connor symbolizes death by foreshadowing the graves, purgatory, and the hearse. In “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” while the family is traveling to Florida, grandmother keeps saying she does not want to go. She is ruining the trip before it even gets started. On the way they pass a grave site, symbolizing that they are about to die because there are six members of the family and six graves about to be dug, “They passed a large cotton field with five or six graves fenced in the middle of it… that was the old family burying ground” (23). The grandmother points the graves out which mean she is going to be a big part of why they die. They continue down the road, as they do, they come to a restaurant called Red Sammy’s which symbolize the purgatory. When they get to Red Sammy’s they see him working under his truck in front of the Tower. The Tower represents Dante’s Inferno and the upper and lower levels of hell. While the family is waiting Red Sammy’s wife comes out, she is a “Tall burnt brown woman with hair and eyes lighter than her skin” (30). The word burnt foreshadows hell and the devil. Red Sammy’s symbolizing the purgatory. The purgatory is the between of heaven and hell, where you go if your sins are not bad enough to go to hell but are not good