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  • Essay / Summary of the short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find”

    This grotesque story of sudden violence in the rural South opens quietly, with a family orchestrating a vacation. Husband Bailey, his wife and their children, John Wesley and June Star, all want to go to Florida. Bailey's grandmother, however, wants to go to East Tennessee, where she has relatives, and she works determinedly to persuade them to go there instead. Unable to convince them that the peregrination to Tennessee will be new and expanded for the children, the grandmother offers as a final argument a newspaper article which verbally expresses that a psychopathic killer who calls himself The Misfit is heading to Florida. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Ignoring the grandmother's wishes and reservations, the family leaves the next morning for Florida. The grandmother gets into the car before the others so that her son does not know that she has taken her feline, Pitty Sing, obsessed in a basket under her seat. As the wandering progresses, she chatters, pointing out fascinating details of the landscape, advising her son not to drive too fast, telling stories to the children. Throughout the journey, the children bicker, the baby cries, the father gets angry. In short, the peregrination is both dreadful and banal, filled with trivialities, insipidities and petty grudges of everyday life, from which the family cannot escape, even on vacation. At lunchtime, they stop at Red Sammy's, a barbecue restaurant, where the grandmother laments that "people certainly aren't nice like they used to be," and Red Sammy agrees: "A good man is difficult to find. » In this conversation, the grandmother, narrow-minded and opinionated, constantly assures that she is a lady, a good Christian and a wise judge of character: she maintains that Red Sammy, an authoritarian loudmouth, is a “good man” and that Europe “must fully indict the current situation”. After leaving the truck stop, the grandmother manipulates her son into taking a detour to optically discern an old plantation that she once visited as a child. Suddenly, she remembers that the plantation is not in Georgia but in Tennessee. She is so upset by this entelechy that she jumps and knocks over her suitcase, whereupon the feline jumps on her son's shoulder, he loses control of the car, the car overturns and they all land in a ditch . an old automobile, “like a hearse,” goes over the hill and stops for them. Three men emerge, one of whom the grandmother instantly identifies as The Misfit. The grandmother, realizing that he intends to kill them, tries to verbally talk him out of it by appealing to his chivalry, urging him not to shoot a lady. Then she tries her hand at flattery, saying she can tell he's a "good man." She tries to tempt him by suggesting that he stop being an outlaw and settle for a comfortable life. She urges him to pray to Jesus for help and forgiveness. In conclusion, she tries hard to bribe him with Mazuma. All of these tactics fail. While she verbalizes with him, he has his henchmen take the other family members into the woods and shoot them. Keep in mind: this is just a sample. Get a personalized paper now from our expert writers. Get a Custom Essay Although The Misfit rejects all of the grandmother's arguments, he discerns them aurally and up close; he is particularly attentive when the grandmother refers to Jesus. Indeed, The Misfit declares.”