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Good Country People Literary Analysis

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Words 2109
Pages 9
Emily Nole
Professor Bruce Poteet
English 161
4 November 2014 “A Good Man Is Hard To Find,” and “Good Country People” Literary Analysis Flannery O’Connor’s works are perfect examples of distortional point of view, and literary irony. Through her work “Good Country People,” O’Connor uses her humor and uses distortional point of view through her characters Hulga, Mrs. Hopewell, and Mrs. Freeman to “humble and expose the biases of the overly intellectual and spiritual bankrupt.” Through her work “A Good Man Is Hard To Find,” O’Connor uses her humor and uses distortional point of view to convey and emphasize that we each experience reality, however distorted, through the unique, sometime morally-distorted lens of individual perception, through …show more content…
O’Connor drives home the point that this family and their grandmother are completely out of touch with reality, by showing us the grandmother’s condescending manner, as is evidenced by her observation of the children’s mother’s attire, and her attitude toward the children. Her fatalistic and demoralizing attitudes about life create for her a reality in which she’s safe and superior. An example of O’Connor distorting reality and employing verbal and situational irony is when she has the grandmother state, “In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady,” the grandmother doesn’t actually expect to be killed and in reality, nobody could do that, but to you, the reader, it’s an example of foreshadowing. As Bailey drives on the dirt road in search of the old plantation, and the grandmother’s stricken with the realization that they’re not only on the wrong road, but in the wrong state, O’Connor employs a distorted situation. The car flips, and yet no one is really injured badly. “Help” then arrives, and you come to realize the “help” isn’t really help at all; it’s the Misfit and his accomplices. You’re horrified when the Misfit has his accomplices take the father and son into the woods and shoots them. O’Connor distorts reality by having the other members of the family not even react to it at all. As a matter of fact, the mother even welcomes death for herself and daughter and baby, by going into the woods willingly with the accomplices. As each member of her family is dragged off into the woods and shot, the grandmother tries to find the key to save her life. In reality, the grandmother surely would’ve been more distraught over her family having just been murdered. The narrator leads the reader to believe that what the grandmother actually says to the

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