"A Good Man Is Hard To Find"

In "A Good Man Is Hard To Find" the "pretender" in the story is the grandmother and the mother and father have true faith. When faced with death, the mother and father do not beg for their lives. They know that God will take care of them. The father goes with Hiram, willingly, knowing he is not going to come back. When The Misfit asks the mother if her and her children would like to join her husband, she replies, "Yes, thank you" (363). She knows she is going to be joined with her husband and children in a better place. The grandmother is the "pretender". She has manners and cares very much about her appearance, but then calls the African-American child a "nigger". She doesn't seem to care about anyone, but herself. It seems as though she only had faith when death came calling. The Misfit said, "She would of been a good woman [...] if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life" (365). The price of achieving a moment of religious grace is that it is just that-only a moment. To have true faith means that you live your life knowing God and obeying Him, not just in the moment before death. According to David Allen Cook, "[t]he literary works of Flannery O'Connor often contend that religious belief can only be consummated by direct confrontation with evil..." (365). The violence of The Misfit is the direct evil that the grandmother is faced with which pushes her to that moment of religious grace, however, it is not enough.