Psychological Meanings in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find”

Excerpts from the Paper

Psychological Meanings in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find”
The short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor is filled with characters that are not very pleasant to read about. The family group has one father, Bailey, who seems constantly angry and stressed out toward his mother and children, two children who fight with each other and are disrespectful to their grandmother, a mother who seems to ignore everything that is happening with her other family members so that she can take care of the baby, and the grandmother, who seems like she is upset with her family but is trying to be as positive about her situation as possible. It is her positive thinking that makes the grandmother not very likeable, because...

.....good man, but I
ain't
the worst in the world neither.”
The Misfit is a complicated character in terms of psychology because while he kills the entire family, he seems to be the only person in the story who thinks about his own psychological situation even though he is a murderer. The Misfit is the character that understands that since he is already a criminal, anything he does, like killing a full family of six people, won’t really change the way he is seen by society or his parents or the guards at the jail he escaped from. Because of this, he can continue to do his work of killing and have the last word of the story. Out of a large group of unlikeable characters, the Misfit is the most complicated and the most knowledgeable about himself.