A Good Man is Hard to Find: Genre 1 key example

The Southern gothic nature of “A Good Man is Hard to Find” comes across after the family at the center of the story gets into a car accident. Until that point, they had been having a normal road trip—full of low-stakes family conflict and stops for food and gas—and then, after their car gets stuck in a ditch and a group of men stop to “help” them, the story enters an eerie and unsettling register. This comes across in the following passage, as the Misfit and his cronies get closer to the family’s damaged car:

The grandmother had the peculiar feeling that the bespectacled man was someone she knew. His face was as familiar to her as if she had known him all her life but she could not recall who he was. He moved away from the car and began to come down the embankment, placing his feet carefully so that he wouldn’t slip. He had on tan and white shoes and no socks, and his ankles were red and thin. “Good afternoon,” he said. “I see you all had you a little spill.”

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That the grandmother here feels that she “had known [the man] all her life but she could not recall who he was” adds an uncanny and unsettling energy to the scene. Readers know something is wrong, but they don’t yet know what. The fact that the man has no socks and his ankles “were red and thin” also signal that something is amiss. And, finally, the man’s overly collected (and somewhat condescending) tone in the face of a brutal accident communicates that his intentions may not be all that good.

This proves to be true, as readers later learn that he is not a helpful stranger, but a conniving murderer who goes by the Misfit. The calm way that the Misfit goes on to have his cronies kill each member of the family one by one contributes to the gothic feel of the story.