Every Minute of Her Life
A look to morality through the lens of Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find."
If you ever want to be thrown deeply into the complexities of morality, be sure to give Flannery O’Connor’s short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” a read. I recently re-read the story, and it sent me off into the following, long reflection.
O’Connor, a devout Catholic, lets her complex, faith-based sensibilities on the nature of good and evil guide her throughout, but in no way does the story come off as “preachy” or message-oriented. In fact, for a college senior independent project I once advised, my student was convinced O’Connor was, like Nietzsche, a moral nihilist.
Rather, the story presents us with a series of challenging moral dilemmas, much in the manner of a classical ethical thought experiment, like the famous “trolley problem”—where switching the track of a runaway train to kill one person may seem the correct moral choice over letting it continue on its course, killing 5 people. O’Connor’s thought experiment, however, has far more moving parts and presents us with far more worrying dilemmas.
The story evokes the set-up and unreality of a thought experiment from its outset, with a grandmother reading aloud to her family a story about an escaped convict known as The Misfit who is headed south (to try to convince her son, Bailey, to take their vacation/road trip to her home state of Tennessee rather than south to Florida) —and so, of course, the grandmother, her son Bailey, his wife and children will end up face to face with the murderous criminal by the story’s end, O’Connor not caring a whit about the exaggerated coincidence.
Using her signature extreme plotting—an approach that with much thanks to her became known as a facet of the “southern grotesque” or “southern Gothic” style—she pits extreme, near caricatures of characters, who are also somehow so very real and funny and recognizably human, against each other, even as she retains her biting, highly entertaining dark humor.
If you don’t yet know the story, you might want to search out a PDF and read it before proceeding, or go ahead and purchase the collection of the same title (then go on and read any other O’Connor you can get your hands on). Her two novels (Wise Blood and The Violent Bear it Away)and many stories—all written before her untimely death at just 39—are well worth a deep dive. Her many letters and essays/lectures are also fantastic, and all give a rich sense of her unmistakable voice. I have, however, tried to not make it essential to know the story before reading this post, and even if I give away a few spoilers, reading the story later in its entirety will still provide plenty to savor and think about.
The story takes its time in bringing Bailey, his mother, wife, infant and two young children, a boy and a girl and The Misfit and his gang together on a little-traveled dirt road in the heart of the deep south. But all of the events and details of the story that lead up to this critical scene need to be considered deeply before the fateful encounter occurs.
One motif I find particularly striking and central to the deeper meaning and moral considerations the story presents is how so many things in the story first appear in writing or in two dimensions before they later appear in full 3-D or in the flesh. The first instance of this is the grandmother reading aloud to her family about the escaped convict who goes by the name The Misfit in the newspaper before the family embark on their road trip, only to meet him in full living color by story’s end. Something first written, later enacted upon viscerally occurs when the grandmother tells the children a story about a man named Mr. Edgar Atkins Teagarden, a distinguished plantation owner, who etched his initials in a watermelon, E.A.T., so no one would touch it, but a child on the plantation ends up eating it when he mistakes the initials for the imperative “eat.” In an echoing foreshadowing of how The Misfit goes from a written story to real (and consequential), they start seeing signs for “Red Sammy’s famous barbecue” along the highway, and sure enough, they are soon talking to the actual Red Sammy (who speaks the title line of the story, “A good man is hard to find,” as he and the grandmother bemoan that “People are certainly not nice like they used to be”).
Another, more subtle but perhaps still more telling example of this motif comes when one of The Misfit’s gang tosses him a shirt with parrot illustrations on it, and the shirt lands on The Misfit’s shoulder, just as a real, living parrot might land on the shoulder of an archetype of immorality—a pirate.
I love the way this motif speaks to something central and utterly essential to what O’Connor is exploring about the nature of morality. For her, moral considerations need to have more at stake. One’s moral beliefs must emerge from deeply held (three-dimensional) convictions; they must transcend cold, rational gestures and be more viscerally felt and acted upon (like that child eating the watermelon).
Throughout the story, the grandmother assesses people as “being good,” repeatedly calling Big Sammy “a good man” and even saying to The Misfit, a decidedly bad man, “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!” Her criteria for what constitutes moral goodness are clearly vague and still “two dimensional.” Goodness for the grandmother is tied only to politeness, chivalry and accepted societal norms. “A good man” is also one who is of the right bloodline, not “common.” Even as she admonishes the children for not being proud of their home state of Georgia, attempting to teach them to be “good,” she uses ugly, demeaning language and reveals her own, far deeper moral failings: “‘In my time,’ said the grandmother, folding her thin veined fingers, ‘children were more respectful of their native states and their parents and everything else. People did right then. Oh look at the cute little pickaninny!’ she said and pointed to a Negro child standing in the door of a shack.” A few lines later she goes on to use the N-word to refer to poor blacks who live in the countryside (those more “common” folk who clearly don’t fit within her notions of “goodness”).
The grandmother’s own “goodness,” is suspect throughout the story in many ways. She sneaks her cat, Pitty Sing, along on the trip, against the wishes of her son (which ironically leads to their demise). She lies to the children about a secret door in the old plantation house to help convince Bailey to turn off on the small dirt road and take a detour from their trip; and she never admits to anyone that she confused the dirt road they crash on in Georgia for one in Tennessee. She even lies to The Misfit about their car accident, and he quickly corrects her: “‘We turned over twice!’ said the grandmother. /‘Oncet,’ he corrected. ‘We seen it happen.’”
By the time we meet The Misfit, and get to hear his long, thorough explanation of his own moral code (clearly grounded in his disturbing psychosis), we are well primed to delve still more deeply into the nature of morality.
The irony here, and likely the reason my student thought O’Connor a moral nihilist and even an atheist, is that The Misfit, unlike the grandmother, has thought long and hard about the nature of good and evil, right and wrong. Still more unlike the grandmother, he acts emphatically based on those beliefs. His recollection of what his father said about him seems to be a kind of admonition against the grandmother’s desire to merely follow accepted societal norms: “‘My daddy said I was a different breed of dog from my brothers and sisters. Daddy said, ‘it’s some that can live their whole life out without asking about it and it’s others has to know why it is, and this boy is one of the latters.’”
He has even taken on a new name, The Misfit, as an extension of his deeply considered moral code, arguing, “‘I said long ago, you get you a signature and sign everything you do and keep a copy of it. Then you’ll know what you done and you can hold up the crime to the punishment and see do they match and in the end you’ll have something to prove you ain’t been treated right. I call myself The Misfit,’ he said, ‘because I can’t make what all I done wrong fit what all I gone through in punishment.’” Here, and elsewhere, it is almost as if he is arguing for a version of ethical utilitarianism, where moral norms are transactional and simply agreed upon and where pleasure is a grounding for “goodness.”
As the grandmother pleads with him to pray to Jesus and insists he “has good blood,” he responds, “‘If He did what He said, then it’s nothing for you to do but thow away everything and follow Him, and if He didn’t, then it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness,’ he said and his voice had become almost a snarl.” And we see that he has weighed different moral philosophies against each other, landing on a kind of ethical egoism, which inverts and distorts a range of ethical philosophies into the maxim, “no pleasure but meanness.” Perhaps more importantly, notice how more complex and considered his moral philosophy is than the grandmother’s, whose moral code even allows her to say that someone so unabashedly bad is still “a good man.”
Irony of ironies, The Misfit does behave like a good, chivalrous southern gentlemen as he goes about his horrendous deeds. He even comforts the grandmother when Bailey loses his patience and yells at her: “Bailey turned his head sharply and said something to his mother that shocked even the children. The old lady began to cry and The Misfit reddened. ‘Lady,’ he said, ‘don’t you get upset. Sometimes a man says things he don’t mean. I don’t reckon he meant to talk to you thataway.’”
What O’Connor brilliantly lays bare in the story is just how few of us possess complexly considered moral codes—that we then act upon emphatically. We see this quite clearly when she gives the grandmother one brief moment of moral clarity and action. She suddenly says to The Misfit, “‘Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children! She reached out and touched him on the shoulder.” Though this is not technically “true,” it’s one of the truest things she utters throughout a story filled with so many of her white lies. She momentarily sees a deeper, philosophic-spiritual truth here, one that extends far beyond her petty, shallow worldview. She glimpses something essential to any meaningful moral philosophy as well—that we are all a part of the same family; as human beings we all struggle with the same uncertainties and fears.
When she reaches out and touches him, she is also, for the first time, acting on her convictions, reaching out in a genuine gesture of tenderness. For O’Connor, a devout Catholic, it is surely a moment of Christian grace, where, the grandmother looks beyond The Misfit’s disqualifications for someone deserving compassion, just as Christ proclaimed his “new commandment”—“Love your enemies…do good to them that hate you; pray for them that persecute you.…” Whereas a moment earlier she even proclaimed that “maybe he didn’t raise the dead,” abandoning her own faith in an effort to save herself, here she abides by one of the most radical demands of her faith and one that posits a radical morality, where true, deep goodness even extends to having the capacity to love those who want to do you harm.
We soon hear The Misfit’s famous line, “‘She would of been a good woman, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.’” He seems to recognize her words and simple touch on his shoulder as something universally “good,” even as he speaks to the real demands of abiding by a meaningful moral code—that perhaps one’s moral actions should necessarily be this radical. We should live our lives as if each moment were our very last, all our petty concerns stripped away as we are left trying to make some final, authentic gesture.
When teaching this story, or just re-reading it and considering my own moral beliefs, I’m always struck by what it demands of us. Students often struggle in discussion (and in their essays) to articulate and adequately defend their own moral beliefs. When presenting them with classical, ethical thought experiments like “the trolley problem,” they struggle to defend either choice, to ground their decisions on any coherent ethical formulation. The Misfit’s claim that “no pleasure but meanness” often led to still more unnerving discussions, where some even seemed on the cusp of buying into his distorted moral outlook and had no convincing counter argument to one who claims they get great pleasure from killing others, so therefore, it’s morally defensible.
Presenting a crash course in moral philosophy, sketching out a range of religious and secular theories gave them some handholds. According to utilitarianism’s transactional approach to morality, someone who enjoys killing people is bad for the group as a whole, and therefore can’t be allowed. But still, for many, this didn’t go far enough. “Isn’t killing someone just bad?!” a student would often proclaim. For most, they wanted to believe that certain behaviors are innately bad and don’t require any complex logical argumentation, but still they struggled to give that a convincing enough defense or justification. What I, along with most of my students, was always left with was that most of us most of the time haven’t thought deeply enough about the nature of morality.
Given that O’Connor was a strong believer, it’s striking that the most outwardly religious character in the story, the grandmother, is also the one whose moral principals are the most shallow and inauthentic. O’Connor may well, even as a practicing Christian, be exploring what her faith demands of her on a deeper, more radical level. Just as The Misfit is radically committed to his belief structure, does the story suggest that we should strive to embrace our moral beliefs in an equally radical manner?
This story came to mind and was revisited as I watched the news and was again upended with the reality that one political party is poised to nominate for the highest political office in the land a convicted rapist and a convicted fraudster—and likely soon to be a convicted insurrectionist and convicted thief of classified documents. This serves perhaps as a poignant example of how little many of us think fully enough about the grounding of our moral beliefs. In interview after interview, rabid MAGA-ites proclaim that they don’t really care if he did these things, just as they didn’t care about his perverse and disturbing claims about sexually assaulting women because he could as a celebrity that proceeded the 2016 election. Morality seems to just not matter to far too many of us anymore.
The Misfit as the upside-down reflection of a human being with deep moral convictions helps me to think more fully about what it means to be moral, to be “a good man.” Big Sammy’s proclamation that “a good man is hard to find” is surely truer than he intends. Being moral is hard work. It takes real Misfit-level devotion, deep questioning and intellectual curiosity—and then a passion to commit oneself to the consequences of one’s beliefs through action. The grandmother is more like most of us than we’d care to admit, whose morality is a vague, not well thought out admixture of custom, tradition, societal hierarchies (all the things that drove Nietzsche to claim in On The Genealogy of Morals that there is nothing innately good or bad in the world, that all morality arises from the human history of power differentials). Most of us try to “be the best we can,” to “make good choices,” but we may well not know what these phrases really mean. We all owe it to ourselves (and the human family we are a part of) to imagine the Misfit’s gun aimed squarely at us, imploring us to investigate and then radically abide by a moral philosophy that has real, three-dimensional depth.
HERE is a resource I’ve used in the past with students when teaching this story and pushing them to think more deeply about their own moral philosophies you might find useful.
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I love O'Connor but I have always found this story hard (as in horribly upsetting) to read. Your explication helps.