HUMOR AND GROTESQUE IN FLANNERY O’CONNOR’S A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND

Flannery O’Connor is known to be one of the most notable fiction writers considered to be the strongest apologist of Roman Catholicism in the twentieth century. Being born and raised in the American South, reasonably enough, her works reflected the regional settings. Her fictional style is mainly representative of the Southern Gothic, populated with grotesque characters, depicting the moody and disturbing life in the American South. With the publication of her first short-story collection “A Good Man is hard to Find” (1955) established O’Connor’s Christian character and darkly comic intent much clearer. Being one of the most famous examples of American Gothic fiction, the story embodies O'Connor's elements of fiction which have been termed as Christian tragicomedy: tragic because of its elements of the grotesque, often violent, events and characters in the stories, and comic because of the author's ability for achieving humor in the midst of this violence. Thus, this paper will look at the ways how the short story moves from satiric family comedy to brutal revelation as a grandmother leads her frustrated family on a vain attempt to find her old house in rural Georgia. While looking for the site of her girlhood property, she accidentally brings her whole family to their deaths at the hands of a tortured killer, The Misfit. He displays an odd regard for the grandmother, who forgives him right before she dies.