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Situational Irony
Style
Explanation and Analysis:
O’Connor’s writing style in “A Good Man is Hard to Find” features a third-person point of view that stays close to the grandmother, long swaths of dialogue, and simple, almost minimalist sentences.
For most of the story, the narrator reports on the grandmother’s experience of the road trip and subsequent attack of her family’s car by the Misfit and his cronies, staying close to her point of view. At times, the narrator even seems to merge with the grandmother’s mind, reporting her thoughts directly in a technique referred to as free indirect discourse. It is only at the very end of the story, after the Misfit has killed the grandmother, that the perspective briefly switches. Here the narrator moves close to the Misfit, offering readers a peek into the potential remorse that he feels for having killed the grandmother after she spoke to him with unexpected compassion and grace.
“A Good Man is Hard to Find” also features long swaths of dialogue, during which the narrator all but disappears. This happens a bit during the road trip portion of the story (when the family members are all fighting with each other) and is even more true after the Misfit and his cronies enter the story. Once the criminals enter the scene, the characters have extensive exchanges during which they both talk to each other and also talk past each other, with the grandmother (and some of her family members) begging for mercy while the Misfit casually muses on his life story and nihilist philosophy.
Finally, O’Connor’s style in this story is characterized by very simple sentences that verge on minimalist. This comes across in the following passage, as the grandmother reckons with the fact that the Misfit has had his cronies kill all of her family members and he may be about to kill her as well:
Alone with The Misfit, the grandmother found that she had lost her voice. There was not a cloud in the sky nor any sun. There was nothing around her but woods. She wanted to tell him that he must pray. She opened and closed her mouth several times before anything came out.
The sentences here are all quite short and declarative, simply describing the basics of the external scene and of the grandmother’s internal experience. The narrator does not wax poetic in this terrifying moment, but simply notes the cloudless sky, the nearby woods, and the grandmother anxiously opening and closing her mouth. The lack of descriptive language contributes to the eerie and unsettling mood of the story.
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