Jesus, Stab Me in the Heart!

Flannery O’Connor at 100

Literary critic Robert Drake argues that Flannery O’Connor’s one overarching theme is Jesus Christ and the scandal of the Christian religion. Drake contends that when O’Connor writes about guilt and suffering, she is the rare author who interprets these things against a Christian frame of reference.[1] He also maintains that her unyielding Christian stance is literary heresy to many writers and critics who assume that the more any writer can flee from dogmatic commitment (unless perhaps to some kind of vague humanitarianism) the better. But for O’Connor, backing away from her Christian viewpoint was non-negotiable. According to Drake, she believed that man “does in fact need to be saved—from the world, the flesh, and the Devil, really at last from himself. And, for her, there can be only one true Savior, Jesus Christ.”[2] Offering no apologies, O’Connor’s overriding question in all of her work is “what do you think of Christ?” Jesus is really the principal character in her fiction, just as her one real story is man’s encounter with Jesus in this fallen world.[3]

Arguably, the story in which O’Connor makes Drake’s point most clearly is also her most famous story, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” The story concerns a family (husband, wife, three children, and grandmother) who encounter a serial killer (The Misfit) and his henchmen after an automobile accident on a country road. As O’Connor systematically has the rest of the family taken off stage to meet their end, she has the grandmother and The Misfit engage in an encounter that centers on Jesus. The grandmother would eagerly lessen Jesus’s significance to the personal development of manners and cultural preservation if it meant her earthly survival. The Misfit’s view of Jesus is not so banal. He focuses the issue on the supernatural reality of whether Jesus is God, the divine miracle-worker, or not.

Part One: The Trip

The story opens with the grandmother seeking to change her son’s (Bailey) mind about going to Florida for a family vacation. She warns him that a Federal Pen escapee called The Misfit is headed to Florida. Bailey never looks up from reading, nor does the children’s mother, “a young woman in slacks, whose face was as broad and innocent as a cabbage and was tied around with a green head-kerchief that had two points on the top like rabbit ears,” who was feeding the baby. Eight-year-old John Wesley hears the grandmother complaining. He says, “If you don’t want to go to Florida, why dontcha stay at home?” to which his sister, June Star, answers, “She wouldn’t stay at home to be queen for a day.”[4]

Bratty as John Wesley and June Starr are, they are correct about the grandmother. The next morning she is the first one ready to go. The grandmother’s “collars and cuffs were white organdy trimmed with lace and at her neckline she had pinned a purple spray of cloth violets containing a sachet,” because it was important “in case of accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady.”[5]

Driving through Georgia in the morning, “the trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled,”[6] but no one was paying attention, the children reading their comic books and their mother sleeping. Even if the family acts as if there is no God, the meanest trees that sparkle testify both to a present glory, the Lord who created the earth and rules over it, and prefigure a glory that is to come.[7]

Bailey stops the car for sandwiches at the Tower, owned and operated by Red Sammy Butts. The grandmother and Red Sammy strike up a conversation where each agrees that a good man is hard to find.[8] Despite his words, Red Sammy keeps a monkey chained outside, no longer trusts others, and treats his wife poorly, and yet the grandmother calls him “a good man.”[9]

The first half of the story ends with the grandmother’s smug pretentiousness revealed. She appears as one who is seemingly incapable of either preferring others in love or judging righteously. Her family is not much better as it alternates between nastiness and vacuousness. The tone, predominately comic in the first half of the story, shifts with the introduction of The Misfit in the second half of the story to a mix of violence and religious concern.[10]

Part Two: The Misfit and the Grandmother

The grandmother recalls an old mansion and begs Bailey that he turn the car off on a side road to find it. After he does so, she realizes that her memory is wrong, panics and loses control of her cat, Pitty Sing, who leaps on Bailey, causing him to crash the car.

Despite the crash and her sitting in a ditch, the grandmother still retains the veneer of Southern gentility, “I believe I have injured an organ,” but no one answered her. The family then sees a car in the distance. The grandmother stood up and waved her arms to get its attention. Three men get out of the black, hearse-like car. The oldest, wearing silver spectacles and holding a gun, was someone that the grandmother sensed she had known all her life.

With the man’s appearance, two attitudes towards life converge in the narrative. One is straightforward in its view of reality. The other rearranges reality to suit itself.[11] “‘We turned over twice! said the grandmother. ‘Once,’ he corrected. ‘We seen it happen.’”[12]

John Wesley asks the man, “Whatcha gonna do with that gun?” which causes the man to ask the children’s mother to have the children sit by her, because children make him nervous.[13] As June Starr challenges the man, “What are you telling US what to do for,” the line of woods behind them “gaped like a dark open mouth.”[14]

The grandmother then recognizes that the man is The Misfit, and he tells her that it would have been better for them if she hadn’t. Bailey immediately says something harsh to his mother that both makes her cry and offends The Misfit’s sense of etiquette. He calms the grandmother, “Lady, don’t you get upset. Sometimes a man says things that he doesn’t mean.”[15] She perceives his words of comfort as an opportunity to save herself. She declares that she knows he is a good man and comes from fine people. The Misfit affirms that he comes from the finest people in the world, interrupts to tell Bobby Lee to watch the children, “you know that they make me nervous,” and then pauses as if to find the right words. He finally remarks that there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, no sun neither. The grandmother replies that it is a beautiful day and repeats that she knows that he is a good man. He tells her, “I pre-chate that, lady,” and then asks Hiram and Bobby Lee to take Bailey and John Wesley off to the woods.

Bailey realizes what they are going to do and cries out, and the grandmother realizes it also. She reached “up to adjust her hat brim as if she were going to the woods with him but it came off in her hand. She stood staring at it and after a second she let it fall on the ground.”[16] Her religion is southern gentility, but in encountering The Misfit, her gentility, symbolized by the hat, the true sign of a lady, is stripped away.[17] After hearing the pistol shots sound from the woods, she cries out, “Bailey, Boy!” but finds herself looking at the Misfit. “I just know you’re a good man,” she said desperately. “Nome, I ain’t a good man,” The Misfit said after a second, as if he had considered her statement carefully, “but I ain’t the worst in the world neither.”[18]

The Misfit then tells the grandmother that he was a gospel singer, served in the military, twice married, been in a tornado, and seen a man burnt alive. He never remembered being bad, but after doing something wrong he was sent to the penitentiary. The grandmother sees another opening to save herself and tells him that if he would pray, Jesus would help him. The Misfit, as if agreeing, says, “Right,” and she states with sudden delight, “Well then, why don’t you pray?” He tells her, “I don’t want no hep . . . I’m doing all right by myself.”[19]

When Bobby Lee and Hiram return, they throw Bailey’s shirt to The Misfit. Putting the shirt on, he declares, “I found out the crime don’t matter. You can do one thing or you can do another, kill a man or take a tire off his car, because sooner or later you’re going to forget what it was you done and just be punished for it.”[20] In hearing this, the grandmother found that she had lost her voice. She opened and closed her mouth several times before something came out. She finally mutters, “‘Jesus, Jesus,’ meaning Jesus will help you, but the way that she was saying it sounded as if she might be cursing.”[21]

“Yes’m,” the Misfit said, as if he agreed. “Jesus thown everything off balance. It was the same case with Him as with me except He hadn’t committed any crime and they could prove I had committed one because they had the papers on me.”[22]

The Misfit then explains to the grandmother that he calls himself The Misfit because he “can’t make what all I done wrong fit what all I gone through in punishment.”[23] It is a terse summary of the problem of evil, a problem that The Misfit agonizes over. He believes that life has already punished him more than he deserves, and yet others who are worse than he is have gotten away without punishment.

More shots ring out from the woods, and the grandmother seeks all the more to appease The Misfit with faint praise and platitudes. “You’ve got good blood! I know you wouldn’t shoot a lady! I know you come from nice people! Pray! Jesus, you ought not to shoot a lady. I’ll give you all the money I’ve got.”[24]

The Misfit responds that there was never a body that gave an undertaker a tip and confronts her in Gospel imperative mode[25] about Jesus.

“Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead.” The Misfit continued, “and he shouldn’t have done it. He thown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it’s nothing for you to do bit throw away everything and follow Him, and if He didn’t, then it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way that you can—by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness.”[26]

For the Misfit, life turns on whether Jesus was God. If Jesus was God, then all lives are his. If Jesus was not God, then life is meaningless. For the grandmother, life doesn’t hinge on Jesus. She mumbled, “Maybe He didn’t raise the dead.” The Misfit replies, “I wasn’t there so I can’t say He didn’t,” but he immediately adds, “I wisht I had of been there,” and hits the ground with his fist. “It ain’t right I wasn’t there because if I had been there I would of known.”[27]

Hearing his voice nearly cracking and sensing that he was about to cry, the grandmother suddenly realizes the futility of her attempts to save her life. She confesses that she and the Misfit are related, “Why you’re one of my babies.” She reaches out and puts her hand on his shoulder, an acknowledgment that she is not a good woman and he is not a good man. Knowing that such shared sinfulness is that which he cannot confess,[28] the Misfit recoils as if a snake had bitten him and shoots her dead.

The Misfit’s sidekicks returned from the woods and stood over the ditch, “looking down at the grandmother who half sat and half lay in a puddle of blood with her legs crossed under her like a child’s and her face smiling up at the cloudless sky.”[29] The Misfit, sans glasses, tells them to take her body off and throw it with the others. O’Connor then has him speak her most quoted line, “She would have been a good woman,” The Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”[30]

Faith and Death

O’Connor openly abhorred the non-redemptive Christianity that the grandmother embodies, those “politer elements for whom the supernatural is an embarrassment and for whom religion has become a department of sociology or culture or personal development.”[31] Part of O’Connor’s genius in exposing the emptiness of such a Christianity in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is with having The Misfit, a practicing nihilist, wrestle with the questions of the faith, as opposed to the grandmother whose faith and piety is unreflective.[32]

As she often does, however, O’Connor uses death to focus the reader’s attention on Jesus Christ and the life to come. The Misfit has ended the grandmother’s life on earth, in death the grandmother smiles heavenward. “For O’Connor,” Sarah Gordon writes, “there are more important worlds than this fallen one, that the grandmother needed to confront her mortality and the flimsiness of her faith in order to be saved.”[33]

O’Connor’s Commentary

O’Connor testified that “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” was her only story that she could read to others without laughing, although when she read it, she felt as if she had been shot four times.[34] Being her most anthologized story, it was also the story that others wanted to engage her about the meaning. She amusingly related an exchange that took place after she read it at Wesleyan College.

After the reading, I went to one of their classes to answer questions. There were several young teachers in there and one began by saying, “Miss O’Connor, why is the Misfit’s hat black?” I said most countrymen in Georgia wore black hats. He looked quite disappointed. Then he said, “Miss O’Connor, the Misfit represents Christ, does he not?” “He does not,’ says I. He really looked hurt at that. Finally he said, “well, Miss O’Connor, what Is the significance of the Misfit’s hat. “To cover his head,” I say. He looked crushed then and left me alone.[35]

She once received a letter from an English professor who taught the story to ninety students spread out over three classes. The professor reported that the students came to the conclusion that the events in the first part of the story are real but that the accident and the appearance of The Misfit were imaginary, as if Bailey was having a dream.

Such an interpretation left O’Connor in a state of shock. Admittedly, she explained, the story is stylized in its depiction of the everyday doings of people in Georgia, and its conventions are comic, but its meaning is serious. “The story,” she said, “is a duel of sorts between the Grandmother and her superficial faith and the Misfit’s more profoundly felt involvement with Christ’s action which set the world off balance for him.”[36]

Before O’Connor read “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” at Hollins College, Virginia, she told those gathered that much of her fiction takes it character from a reasonable use of the unreasonable, that belief is the engine that makes perception operate in her stories. “The heroine of this story, the Grandmother, is in the most significant position life offers the Christian. She is facing death. And to all appearances she, like the rest of us, is not too well prepared for it.”[37]

O’Connor did not deny that the grandmother is a hypocritical old soul whose wits are no match for The Misfit’s. But it is through the grandmother that the moment of grace occurs in the story. Her family murdered, alone with The Misfit, the grandmother’s

head clears for an instant and she realizes, even in her limited way, that she is responsible for the man before her and joined to him by ties of kinship which have their roots deep in the mystery she has been merely pratting about so far. And at this point, she does the right thing, she makes the right gesture.[38]

O’Connor continued that if she took out the grandmother’s gesture, she would have no story. In every story that she wrote, not just in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” the key to understanding is the moment of grace, the gesture, that indicates where the real heart of the story lies. She said, “This would have to be an action or a gesture which was both totally right and totally unexpected; it would have to be one that was both in character and beyond character; it would have to suggest both the world and eternity.”[39] She then elaborated that what she was talking about was writing on

the analogical level, that is, the level that has to do with the Divine life and our participation in it. It would be a gesture that transcended any neat allegory that might have been intended or any pat moral categories a reader could make. It would be a gesture which somehow made contact with mystery.[40]

O’Connor further explained that she found violence capable of returning her characters (and her readers) to reality and preparing them to accept that moment of grace. She understood that many would not accept her explanation and would equate her fiction with Southern Gothic horror, but she stated that she had no interest in using violence as a means in itself. The lines of spiritual motion that pulled her forward, and should pull the reader forward if she had done her job well, were invisible lines. Consequently, “in this story you should be on the lookout for such things as the action of grace in the Grandmother’s soul, and not for the dead bodies.”[41]

O’Connor preferred to think, unlikely as it seemed, that “the old lady’s gesture, like the mustard-seed, will grow to be a great crow-filled tree in the Misfit’s heart, and will be enough of a pain to him there to turn him into the prophet that he was meant to become.” She then added, “But that’s another story.”[42]

Endnotes

[1] Robert Drake, Flannery O’Connor (Eerdmans, 1966), 13–14.

[2] Robert Drake, “Flannery O’Connor and American Literature,” Flannery O’Connor Bulletin, vol. 3 (Autumn 1974): 11.

[3] Robert Drake, “The Paradigm of Flannery O’Connor’s True Country,” Studies in Short Fiction 6 (1968): 434.

[4] Flannery O’Connor, The Complete Stories (Noonday, 1995), 117.

[5] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 118. O’Connor paints a contrast between the grandmother and the children’s mother. The children’s mother (her only moniker in the story) has no idea on how to dress as a lady. She wears slacks and a green head-kerchief two days in a row. Further, if the grandmother is alienated from reality by being too judgmental, the children’s mother is alienated from reality by her passivity. When The Misfit, who just had her husband killed, asks her if she would like to join him, she replies, “Yes, thank you.” Her one positive assertion, “We’ll all stay in the car,” which comes after John Wesley declares that he would like to go explore the mansion, signals her attitude towards life. See, Margaret Whitt, Understanding Flannery O’Connor (Univ. of South Carolina, 1997), 45, and Kathleen Feeley, Flannery O’Connor: Voice of the Peacock (Rutgers, 1972), 70–71.

[6] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 119.

[7] Drake, “American Literature,” 19.

[8] Mark Grief writes that for O’Connor a “good” man “is hard to find in any secular perspective, because, first, people think “good” is a secular judgment, when it’s not; and second, they think a “man” can take his own measure, without God, which he can’t.” Mark Grief, The Age of the Crisis of Man (Princeton, 2015), 207.

[9] Hurd argues that throughout the story O’Connor suggests Roman law (Pompeian) punishment for those found guilty of murdering blood-relatives. Blood-relatives murderers were tossed into the sea in a sack that contained a cock, a dog or ape, and snakes. Each of these or their equivalent is found in the story: Red Sammy’s monkey, parrots on Bailey’s shirt, The Misfit’s father calling him a dog, and the Misfit springing back as if a snake had bitten him. Myles Raymond Hurd, “The Misfit as Parricide in Flannery O’Connor’s ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find,’” Notes on Contemporary Literature, 22.4 (1992): 5–7.

[10] Frederick Asals, The Extremity of Imagination (Univ. of Georgia, 1982), 152.

[11] Feeley, Voice of the Peacock, 72.

[12] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 126.

[13] In contrast to The Misfit who desires the little children be kept from him, Jesus tells his disciples to let the little children come to him and not to hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belong to such as these. Michael O. Bellamy, “Everything Off Balance: Protestant Election in Flannery O’Connor’s ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find,'” Flannery O’Connor Bulletin, vol. 8 (Autumn 1979): 117.

[14] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 126–127.

[15] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 127.

[16] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 128.

[17] Feeley, Flannery O’Connor, 72.

[18] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 128.

[19] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 130.

[20] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 130–131.

[21] Bernetta Quinn observes that “the grandmother in all her exhortations to [the Misfit] to pray never turns to Christ herself; she wants others to practice religion while ignoring it herself.” M. Bernetta Quinn, “Flannery O’Connor, a Realist of Distances,” The Added Dimension, eds. Melvin Friedman and Lewis Lawson (Fordham, 1966), 175.

[22] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 131.

[23] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 131.

[24] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 131–132.

[25] Drake, Flannery O’Connor, 24.

[26] O’Connor, The Complete Stories, 132. Ralph Wood writes that The Misfit is appalled that Jesus raised the dead. “This bringer of death is profoundly offended that the Giver of Life cannot be dismissed as a mere holy man or eminent ethical figure but must be adjudged as either the incarnate God or else a wholesale fraud.” Ralph C. Wood, Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South (Eerdmans, 2005), 38.

[27] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 132.

[28] Wood, Christ-Haunted South, 40.

[29] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 132.

[30] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 133. Ralph Wood writes, “Had death been perennially present to remind the Grandmother of her total dependence on God, she would have trusted in his grace rather than her own gentility.” Ralph C. Wood, The Comedy of Redemption (Notre Dame, 2000), 90.

[31] Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners, eds. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970), 207.

[32] Wood, Christ-Haunted South, 41.

[33] Sarah Gordon, “Surface Matters in Flannery O’Connor’s Fiction,” Flannery O’Connor Review, vol. 11 (2013): 24.

[34] Flannery O’Connor to Katharine Ann Porter, August 17, 1963, Good Things Out of Nazareth, 271.

[35] Flannery O’Connor to Caroline Gordon, May 10, 1959, Good Things Out of Nazareth, 141.

[36] Flannery O’Connor to a Professor of English, March 28, 1961, Habit of Being, 437.

[37] O’Connor, Mystery and Manners, 110.

[38] O’Connor, Mystery and Manners, 111–112.

[39] O’Connor, Mystery and Manners, 111.

[40] O’Connor, Mystery and Manners, 111.

[41] O’Connor, Mystery and Manners, 113.

[42] O’Connor, “On Her Own Work,” 112–113.

Danny E. Olinger is a minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and serves as the general secretary of the Committee on Christian Education of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Ordained Servant Online, March, 2025.