"A Good Man is Hard to Find"

Grotesque by definition is odd or unnatural in shape, appearance, or character; fantastically ugly or absurd; bizarre. In the story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor, you could consider his short story is to be a southern grotesque

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The characters in the story give a great background to the southern feel. The grandmother who is described to have a “leathery, thin face…brown eyes,” talks quite a lot, who is racist, and who is dressed so that “ in case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady,” which in the end it becomes very ironic. She almost annoys you when reading. Another great character who plays a large role in the story is the misfit who is an older man with hair starting to gray and “silver-rimmed spectacles that gave him a scholarly look.” He is talked about early on in the story which makes it very satirical that the family meets him in the end. After the family is killed you cannot help but despise him for doing this to a helpless family, yet the family wasn’t the “perfect family”. The rest are not as described in detail. What we do know is the mother barely speaks, the father is grumpy, and the children are wild and very mouthy.

The plot on the other hand is what really makes the story grotesque. First you have a simple country family from good ol’ Georgia who just happens to be on a trip, when only the worst is yet to come. When reading the family gets into a car accident, in which no one dies, you cannot help but feel sympathy for them, despite how much they irritate the reader. The real twist of the story is soon after the wreck, the car that in a cheerful story would have been their savior turns out to be the misfit and his gang, who ends up murdering all of them. This is what I condsider to make the story very grotesque.