(A Good Man is Hard to Find: Nihilism and Grace)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdPtVZDspIY

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But more than anything else, as a writer, I was fascinated by the similarity of the emotional tensions of Bigger in America and in Nazi Germany and Bigger in old Russia. All Bigger Thomases, white and black, felt tense, afraid, nervous, hysterical, and restless. From far away Nazi Germany and old Russia had come to me items of knowledge that told me that certain modern experiences were creating types of personalities whose existence ignored racial and national lines of demarcation, that these personalities carried with them a more universal drama-element than anything I’d ever encountered before; that these personalities were mainly imposed upon men and women living in a world whose fundamental assumptions could no longer be taken for granted: a world ridden with national and class strife; a world whose metaphysical meanings had vanished; a world in which God no longer existed as a daily focal point of men’s lives; a world in which men could no longer retain their faith in a ultimate hereafter. It was a highly geared world whose nature was conflict and action, a world whose limited area and vision imperiously urged men to satisfy their organisms, a world that existed on a plane of animal sensation alone (Wright, Introduction: How “Bigger” was Born xix).

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- Richard Wright, 1940

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A Good Man is Hard to Find: Nihilism and Grace

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One of the defining attributes of Flannery O’Connor’s fiction, especially for those unfamiliar with her work, is that it’s perplexing. Her stories can appear highly enigmatic to a reader that might be unfamiliarized with her material, and this is as much evidenced by the commentary she provides in her non-fictional essays then it might be by the general consensus seen in some classrooms. However, one way to understand Flannery O’Connor’s fiction, or at the very least to simplify it, is to view it as operating on two principle bases. The first, is that it very often concerns itself with conceptions of good and evil. Regardless of the specific subject that O’Connor approaches, much of the thematic predicates in her stories rely on this relationship. The second, is that O’Connor demonstrates evil through a precise method of characterization - often portraying both her protagonists and antagonists with characteristics that expose fundamental, human flaws - and situates these flaws against the good that she illustrates through what is denotated as ‘the action of grace’.

This is not to say that O’Connor’s work is readily clarified by this pattern, in fact it’s to say the opposite, that for an uninitiated reader it becomes almost paramount to identity a pattern in order to understand her work. The nature of evil, as well as the action of grace, vary according to the complex and often highly specified themes in each individual story. However, it becomes crucial to identify O’Connor’s designations of grace and evil in order to further elaborate upon the complexities inherent in O’Connor’s narratives. In “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, these dynamics are most prominently exhibited through the interactions of two central characters, that of ‘the Grandmother’ - whose characteristics are closely aligned with the traditionalism of the southern United States - and that of ‘the Misfit’, who is represented by O’Connor as a personification of nihilism and the dangers she associates with the nihilist’s philosophy. Of the two, and not discounting the significance of the former, the latter character of the Misfit provides an almost uncanny psychological profile for what could be loosely considered as pathological nihilism. Moreover, O’Connor’s treatment of the Misfit’s character implies an association between the Misfit’s pathology and the standard of evil she conveys within her text. Because this rendition of evil is so closely affiliated with a nihilistic purview, the indication of this standard situates “A Good Man is Hard to Find” within the broader contexts of a counter or contra-nihilist tradition.

In an effort to understand the literary qualities in O’Connor’s fiction, it can be insightful to approach them alongside some of the non-fictional commentary provided by O’Connor in her essays. When discussing fiction as a literary artform, she states that the “basis of art is truth, both in manner and in mode” and that a “person who aims after art in his work aims after truth” (“O'Connor, ‘The Nature and Aim of Fiction’” 65). Truth is something that for O’Connor represents both the aim and good in fiction writing, and ascertaining truth for the betterment of her readers is what she suggests the purpose of her writing is. Quite notably, she cites theological philosopher Thomas Aquinas in relation to this correlative. She observes that “St. Thomas said that the artist is concerned with the good of that which is made” (65) - suggesting that for the artist good lays in the actual object of the art itself, as something that is produced or composed, and that it is with this pursuit that O’Connor as an author is concerned.

The idea of the art as an independent, moral object is further elaborated through the ‘manners’ that O’Connor assigns to her work. She states that technique is an “organic” concept, “something that grows out of the material” and “is presented in such a way that the reader has the sense that it is unfolding around him” (67;73). This is to say that meaning in O’Connor’s work is in large part dependent upon the fact that its method of delivery is experiential, that “the whole story is the meaning, because it is an experience” and deals with “abstraction” through an unfolding narration (73). Meaning is illusive in O’Connor’s stories because it is folded into the descriptive language and storytelling that O’Connor uses to dress abstract ideas. What’s more, is that O’Connor considers a story’s meaning to directly coincide with the “dramatic”, or theatrical “sense” of the storyteller’s medium. She states that “a piece of fiction must be very much a self-contained dramatic unit”, that it carries “its meaning inside it” and is addressed “with character and action, not about character and action” (75-76). What this indicates is that method and meaning are deeply intertwined within O’Connor’s storytelling, almost to the extent where they become inseparable. Concepts such as morality or spirituality are presented to the reader as opposed to explained, to the degree where character and action become instrumental to meaning as opposed to being the meanings in and of themselves.

The mutuality of this relationship is especially interesting when considering “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” As what O’Connor might consider abstractions, good and evil are contained within the elements of the narrative, and it is with or through characters such as the Misfit and The Grandmother that she is able to illustrate moral interaction. As John Desmond notes in his article ““Flannery O’Conner’s Misfit and the Mystery of Evil”, it is “not difficult to label the agent of evil in Flannery O'Connor's signature story” (129). As the character responsible for the systematic murder of the Grandmother and her family - which occurs upon being identified by the Grandmother as a recently escaped convict (O’Connor 9) - the quality of evil associated with the Misfit is readily identifiable through his plot-action. However, the sequences that depict this violence rarely focus upon the acts themselves. Apart from the death of the grandmother, the killings occur out of frame and are alluded to only through the sound of pistol shots or inferred based on the exchange of Baily’s shirt (11). What this does is situate violence as an emphatic tool. Rather than feature violence directly, O’Connor uses it instead to deepen the interactions between the Misfit and the Grandmother through inference, as opposed to direct portrayal.

Fundamentally, it is the dialogue that takes place during these violent sequences that defines the Misfit’s character. In this regard, John Desmond argues that the Misfit’s “conversation with the Grandmother reveals” his underlying character traits, “the most important of which is that the Misfit wants some rationale and justification for his spiritual predicament” (129). Upon hearing the Grandmother evoke the name of Jesus, the Misfit responds “Yes’m… Jesus shown everything off balance. It was the same case with Him as with me except He hadn’t committed any crime” (“O'Connor, ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’” 12). What’s more, is that the same imbalance that the Misfit associates with Jesus is reinforced by the disparity he feels between “crime” and “punishment”. He continues: “I call myself The Misfit… because I can’t make what all I done wrong fit what all I gone through in punishment” (12). It is both a spiritual and moral crisis that preoccupies the Misfit’s nature, rooted in a world with irreconcilable evil, and it is his inability to rationalize the causalities of suffering that define him as a character.

Again, O’Connor uses violence implied out of frame to punctuate this dilemma. Subsequent to the explanation he provides to his name, the text describes “a piercing scream from the woods, followed closely by a pistol report”, whereafter the Misfit asks: “Does it seem right to you, lady, that one is punished a heap and another ain’t punished at all” (12)?   What is interesting about this passage is that the Misfit posits the question rhetorically, almost as if to affirm to himself an answer that he already knows. The gunshots themselves demonstrate an inescapable wrong attached to the situation, and yet the Misfit asks the grandmother if she can rationalise it as it happens - almost as if he is simultaneously imploring the Grandmother for an explanation while reinforcing that he is aware of none that apply.

            Regarding this, and as what might appear as contradiction, John Desmond suggests that the Misfit is a character “caught between absurdity and faith” - rejecting “belief in Christ” while recognizing “that a world in which actions and consequences cannot be made sense of leads ultimately to a world in which logical distinctions between good and evil collapse” (131). From Desmond’s perspective, the manner with which the Misfit posits his question “reflects a spiritual condition that is both fundamentally human and conspicuously modern in temper” (130). The inherent irony in this is that the Misfit is situated both as a character caught in existential crisis, and yet as directly responsible for the events that reflect the absurdity of the situation. However, in order to understand the significance of this depiction, it is helpful to consider the Misfit as an instrument in the narrative, as opposed to a character with which the entire meaning of the story is attached.

As mentioned prior, O’Connor’s method of demonstrating artistic truth lays in her telling stories with characters, as opposed to about characters. While to an extent the story offers a portrait of evil as rendered through the Misfit, in many ways the narrative concerns itself equally with that of the change that takes place in the Grandmother. In her dissertation thesis titled "Flannery O'Connor, Fyodor Dostoevsky and the Antimodernist Tradition", Katherine H. Prown elaborates upon the significance of O’Connor’s fiction by offering a comparison between her work and that of Fyodor Dostoevsky. She argues that despite there being no directly evident link between either of the two authors, the commonalities in their work have much to do with their shared interest in religious, or anti-secular messagery. She contends that “O'Connor and Dostoevsky employ highly similar literary techniques” in an effort “to create a fictional illustration of the chaos and suffering they believe to have resulted from the modern world's devotion to secularism” (23). Of these techniques are included: a) a shared “use of ironic humor” utilized “to illustrate the essential absurdity and ridiculousness of human existence without God”; b) the creation of “a gallery of ‘double’ characters meant to mimic in a distorted but revealing form the worst impulses of the protagonists”; and c) that they both

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rely heavily on the use of "epiphanic" scenes as a means of illustrating God's grace in action, revealing Itself to the protagonist through the form of a vision, dream, or through some catastrophic experience (23).

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Aside from Dostoevsky, and as interesting a comparison as Prown makes in her argument, the most relevant of these techniques as they pertain to “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is evidenced in the act of epiphany, concentrated in large part upon the Grandmother.

            In the closing sequences of the narrative, The Misfit again attributes Jesus as being responsible for the balance he sees as disproportionate within himself. In reference to the resurrection, he states that “Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead” and that, in an emphasized repetition, it is due to the resurrection that Jesus had “shown everything off balance” (“O'Connor, ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’” 12). For the Misfit, the resurrection represents an event with the deciding potential to affirm the purpose of existence, and yet is contingent entirely upon whether or not the story is actually true. In recognizing this contingency, the Misfit “simply accepts the conclusion that if Jesus was a fraud, then there truly is no code of morality by which one must live” (Prown 36) - concluding that “it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left” unburdened by the notion that one’s actions have bearing upon a universe ungoverned by moral or spiritual principles (“O'Connor, ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’” 13).

In recognizing the affliction associated with this resolution, and at the instant of her death, the Grandmother is in turn described as having ‘a moment of clarity’. The text reads:

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the grandmother’s head cleared for an instant. She saw the man’s face twisted close to her own as if he were going to cry and she murmured, “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children! (13).

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Despite the “circumstances surrounding her death”, it is in acknowledging kinship that the Grandmother is able to “recognize and accept the presence of God's grace” (Prown 35). At the moment of her death she is able to identify with the humanity in her own killer, a humanity that the Misfit himself is denoted as being unable to understand within the constrictions of his own existential dilemma. By likening the Misfit to ‘one of her own children,’ the Grandmother “rejects his solitary identity” (Desmond 135) and is emersed instead with the commonalities she sees in a shared human experience - viewing the misfit on the basis of maternal love, as opposed to the horror that her impending death might naturally elicit.

This sequence represents both the action of grace and the underlying ‘truth’ that O’Connor seeks to convey in her storytelling. As brief a sequence as it might appear, it is the culmination of the entire, unfolding narrative and, as the action of epiphany, represents the good counterbalancing evil in O’Connor’s fiction. In the opening chapter of his academic book, Return to Good and Evil: Flannery O’Connor’s Response to Nihilism, Henry Edmonson recognizes that in Flannery O’Connor’s body of work, “descriptions of the concept of evil” are “far more conspicuous than her discussions of good” (4). Edmonson argues that this is because “good, portrayed by O'Connor as natural and divine grace intervening in human affairs, occurs where it is most needed-in the midst of evil”, and that to this end, O’Connor’s depiction of epiphany “illustrates that this grace is often prompted by the pressure of malevolent events and circumstances”, consequently leading the recipient, in this case the Grandmother, “to that which they need most, redemption” (4). In trying to ascertain the human-being within her own killer, The Grandmother exhibits love even in the face of ir-rationalizable violence and human evil - which, in many ways is indicative of the same qualities expressed by Christ within the story of Jesus’ crucifixion.

By depicting grace in this manner, O’Connor is able to situate a divine empathy directly against the philosophies that she attributes to the Misfit’s character - counteracting a nihilist standard with an action that is evocative of Christ. The basis of study in Henry Edmonson’s aforementioned book, Return to Good and Evil: Flannery O’Connor’s Response to Nihilism, is predicated on investigating this relationship as it pertains to O’Connor’s fiction. Nihilism, as he describes it, “builds upon the Enlightenment hope in the infinite progress of the human race and teaches that if we are to evolve” as a species, “traditional values and sentiments must be swept away” (19). One of the root facets of nihilism is that it seeks to abandon metaphysical principles, especially those that pertain to a morality based in Christian theologies. In his book, Edmonson grounds his understanding of Nihilism as it is expressed in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. He states that while Nietzsche “is not the only exponent of nihilism,… he is far and away the most important and articulate of its proponents” - due in large part to theories Nietzsche presents in his book Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Nietzsche, as Edmond summarizes, contends that “religion and tradition are philosophically bankrupt” within the purviews of the modern world, and that “their decline into "nothingness" must be hastened so as to realize the greatness that is human destiny” (20). As a philosophy, not only does nihilism advocate atheistic principles, but in fact encourages the abandonment of the moralities attached to Christian belief. Thus, for a Catholic author influenced by the theological philosophies of St. Thomas Aquinas, nihilism represents a philosophy that immediately threatens the core precedents of O’Connor’s own belief system.

Good and evil, as they are expressed in “A Good Man is Hard to Find” are represented respectively by the action of grace and the nihilistic characterization informing the Misfit’s behaviours. Nihilism and Christianity are essentially situated as oppositional concepts within the dynamic of the narrative, and O’Connor utilizes dramatic action between the Grandmother and the Misfit in order to diegetically portray this contention. Violence and philosophy fundamentally inform the makeup of the Misfit’s character, and as expressed by O’Connor, represent a pathology of evil that the story seeks to counteract. Grace, as it appears to the Grandmother, becomes the instrumental device that reinforces the idea that salvation can be obtained even in the wake of profound violence, irrationalized by a nihilistic killer, and emerging for the Grandmother even at the moment of her death.

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Desmond, John. “Flannery O’Conner’s Misfit and the Mystery of Evil.” Renascence, vol. 56, no. 2, Winter 2004, 129-137. EBSCOhost, https://ezproxy.viu.ca/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/flannery-oconnors-misfit-mystery-evil/docview/194937462/se-2?accountid=12246.

Edmondson, Henry T.. Return to Good and Evil: Flannery O’Connor’s Response to Nihilism. Lexington Books, 2002. EBSCOhost, https://search-ebscohost-com.ezproxy.viu.ca/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,cookie&db=nlebk&AN=634646&site=ehost-live. 

Prown, Katherine Hemple, "Flannery O'Connor, Fyodor Dostoevsky and the Antimodernist Tradition" (1988). Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects. William & Mary. Paper 1539625432.
https://dx.doi.org/doi:10.21220/s2-72wy-1z59

Wright, Richard. Introduction: How “Bigger” was Born. Native Son, by Richard Wright. Harper & Row, Publishers Inc., March 1, 1940. Print.