A Good Man Is Hard to Find: the Characters Are Symbols Essay Example

focused on herself in relation to how others think of her. The Second Phase occurs when she is speaking to The Misfit. In the story, The Misfit represents a quasi-final judgment. He does this by acting like a mirror. He lets whatever The Grandmother says bounce right off him.

He never really agrees with her or disagrees, and in the end he is the one who kills her.His second to last line, "She would of been a good woman," The Misfit said, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life," (O'Conner 152). might be the way O'Conner felt about most of us alive, or how she felt that God must feel about us. The third, and final phase of The Grandmother is the moment of redemption. She finally sees The Misfit for who he really is, a person just like her.

He is not someone who was made by his social class. He is a simple human being just like her. At this point she sees herself in relation to everyone else. She finally realizes that she is not made by her class.Society makes the class, and she just fits into it. She shows this by claiming that The Misfit could be one of her own beloved children.

?? The long time she spent in her life in Samsara (the Buddhist term for the eternal cycle of suffering), her time she spent reasoning with the final judger, and her redemption all add up to the spiritual plight that we all must take in life. We may not all be Christians, like Flannery O'Connor, but The Plight (or The Journey)

of Spirituality applies to everyone. We all must take travel it. We all know it, and that makes this story universal.