The Grandmother's Christianity

Essay by cool8099College, Undergraduate November 2004

download word file, 6 pages 3.0

In "A Good Man Is Hard To Find", Flannery O'Connor uses a variety of narrative techniques to create an intriguing story. The most significant are the point of view from which she writes and the religious references that lie throughout her story. O'Connor writes from a third person point of view telling the story from the perspective of the grandmother and orchestrates the events in the plot from a fundamentalist Christian stance.

The point of view straddles the line between limited omniscience and total omniscience. O'Connor lets us know whose story this is in the first two lines, "The grandmother didn't want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey's mind"(1380). O'Connor does not reveal any of the character's thoughts. She gives us background information about what happens just before the story starts.

That's something only an omniscient or panoramic narrator would know. She does, however, limit the point of view to the grandmother and continues to do so in the next lines, "Bailey was the son she lived with, her only boy"(1380). The only action we see is as it relates to the limited view of the grandmother, "Bailey didn't look up from his reading so she wheeled around then and faced the children's mother, a young woman in slacks . . ."(1380).

O'Connor continues to toggle between a total omniscient and limited omniscient narrator. "She didn't intend for the cat to be left alone in the house for three days because he would miss her too much and she was afraid he might brush against one of the gas burners and accidentally asphyxiate himself. Her son, Bailey, didn't like to arrive at a motel with a cat"(1381). She gives us...