A Good Man is Hard to Find

This story is fascinating. I loved it, it made me think about human behaviors. It sent a bone chilling thrill throughout my body. I love how the arthour made me feel remorse for "The Misfit" instead of the family he killed. The first thing I noticed about this story is that the narrator never named the children's mother. The narrator always refers to her as the children's mother, not wife or daughter-in-law. We saw this story from the grandmothers point of view, she did have a name either. I t seems like this is a comfortable family, living in a comfortable house but they seem spaced out, the family doesn't seem close to one another at all. The whole family seems to see the grandmother as a pest. She is always pressuring them to do things they don't want to do. She pressures them to go down a dirt road to some old plantation that was never there in the first place. She is always talking about what this is and what that is.

The kids are very ill mannered. they are a bunch of smart allics that I would hate to have to watch. There is a funny contrast between the children's mother and the grandmother. The children's mother seems to be passive while the grandmother is bold and robust. The children's mother wears slacks and kerchiefs, while the grandmother wears violets in her straw hat with white organdy trimmed collars and cuffs. When the grandmother said "In case of an accident, anyone seeing her on the highway would know at once that she was a lady" kinda gave a foreshadow of what might happen. I also thought that the grandmother was a very vain person. she always cares about what she looks like no matter if she was riding from Georgia to Florida in a hot sticky car between two feisty children.

The setting of this story seems to be in the prejudice south and this must be a white family. She referred to a black child as a pickaninny. that was a racist term for African-Americans. The grandmother was so obsessed with wanting to take a picture of this child with no pants on. It seemed to me that this made her feel good about herself to know that someone was beneath her. I wonder what Bailey said to his mother to make her so upset when they encountered "The Misfit".