The Unfortunate Redemption

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The Unfortunate Redemption
At first I found O’Connor’s piece, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” grotesque and unappealing; however, after rereading, it was fascinating. The story is about a vacation, a grandmother, her son Bailey and his family go on that ends in misfortune. Bailey and his wife have a young baby and two unruly children: John Wesley and June Star. The grandmother is a cantankerous either knowingly or not leads them to their deaths. O’Connor meticulously intertwines foreshadowing throughout the story that hint to the eventful end, where the grandmother has an epiphany.
The story begins with foreshadowing when the grandmother tries to persuade her son Bailey to visit Tennessee instead of Florida. O’Connor explains the grandma does not want to go to Florida because a felon called “The Misfit” has just escaped from jail and is heading towards Florida on a killing spree (302). The grandma’s story is about the man is ironic because he ends up being the family’s killer. Not winning the debate, the grandmother and family head off destined to Florida. She brings her cat, Pitty Sing, and hides him in a basket because she knows Bailey would not want him to go; she is afraid the cat will be lonely and might accidentally kill himself if left alone (303). It is ironic that she feels the cat would die at home, when the cat is the one who causes the car accident later on in the story.
Destined to Florida, the grandmother dresses in distinguishable clothes so if there is an


accident, people would identify her as a lady is she is dead (303). This is a foreshadowing of the
fateful end the grandmother will come to. Even more, the nice clothes she is wearing seem
similar to clothes worn by the dead for coffin viewings. O’Connor describes the grandmother of wearing a blue hat with flowers and a blue printed dress with the cuffs “white organdy trimmed with lace and at her neckline she had pinned ...