Topic

Flannery O’Connor “A Good Man”

Literary Criticism Response:
Assignment: Find a work of academic literary criticism (published in an academic
journal, over 9 pages long) about the author or literary text we are reading. Write an
MLA citation for this literary criticism. Then, write at least 10 sentences of summary
of the author’s argument. Finally, write at least ten sentences of your personal
response: what you liked/disliked, what you learned, how it changed your view of the
text, what you could not understand, etc.
1. Research: You can find good academic literary criticism through the library
databases. Go to https://www.smc.edu/student-support/academic-support/library/.
Click Databases, and then click all databases. The first database, Academic Search
Premier, is a good choice. Search by the author’s name and/or the title of the literary
text. Don’t just pick the first article that appears. Try to find one on our specific
literary text that is interesting and understandable.
2. MLA Citation: The Purdue OWL webpage has the MLA rules. The format for
academic journals is the following:
i. Author(s). “Title of Article.” Title of Journal, Volume, Issue, Year,
pages.
3. Accurately and precisely summarize the article’s argument for at least 10
sentences.
4. Personally and thoughtfully respond to the argument for at least 10 sentences.

Bellow I will provide all the sources the teacher provided

https://repositorio.ufsc.br/bitstream/handle/12345… -here is the short story

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Flannery-OConnor (Links to an external site.) – authors bio

Flannery O’Connor “A Good Man” 2

It should be shocking to hear that Flannery O’Connor was a deeply devout and religious woman. She reportedly went to mass every day, and her letters and essays are sprinkled with references to God and theology. But instead of telling a story about miracles and good deeds resulting in a happy ending, she narrates a brutal story that feels straight from the true crime genre and ends with numerous deaths. So the initial question should be how can you reconcile what you know about her religious beliefs with the dark content of this story? What is the moral lesson to be drawn from this story?

Before the killers arrive, the first half of the story is a domestic drama about a family on a road trip. But as with Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” if you carefully analyze the relationships of the family members you can see that things are not ideal.

The son Bailey is not loving towards his mother, barely pays attention to her, and seems to want to have nothing to do with her.

The wife hardly shows up in the story, but it is mentioned that she is wearing slacks and a headkerchief. These seem like random realistic details, but the fact that O’Connor repeats them two times in two pages makes them seem important. Remember that in the 1950s, many still believed that a woman should only wear a dress or skirt, and that hair should be done up in a specific way. The wife wearing slacks and not doing her hair therefore reveals that she is a modern, post-war woman, at least in her fashion. It is very clear that the grandmother judges her for this and looks down on her for not being a “lady” like herself.

Finally, the two children (aside from the baby) seem to be modern brats. They are disrespectful of older people numerous times. They are always reading comic books, which seems to have given them a thirst for violence. They seem excited when the accident happened and disappointed that nobody died. Again, the grandmother clearly looks down upon them and even claims children in the past were better.

Flannery O’Connor “A Good Man” 3

The accident is the turning point from the family drama of the story’s first half to the true crime violence of its second half. It should be noted that the grandmother is responsible for the accident in many ways and therefore partially responsible for the fate of the family at the end, even if she doesn’t kill them. If she hadn’t selfishly wanted to go elsewhere, if she hadn’t snuck her cat in, if she hadn’t been so lost in unreliable memories of the past, and if she hadn’t been too embarrassed to admit her mistake, the family might have had a happy and successful road trip.

Flannery O’Connor “A Good Man” 4

Finally, watch the following video, in which I lead you through a reading of the end of the story: