Violence as the Highest Common Denominator in a Moment of Grace

In 1945, 20 year-old Flannery O'Connor arrived at the University of Iowa and wanted to take part in a very reputable writers' workshop. However, it was not her speech that granted her access but her manner of writing that could be seen by Paul Engle - a poet and a director of a writing program - as a forerunner of her career as a successful writer: "'My name is Flannery O'Connor,' [Mr Engle] read from her hasty note. 'I'm not a journalist. Can I come to the Writer's Workshop?'"(Giroux) On that account she was admitted. Yet, for O'Connor, being a Southerner writer and a Catholic at the same time, it seemed that it would be difficult for the Northerner contemporaries to understand her writing. Fortunately, her works were and still are appreciated, especially since they reveal the problems of American society with violence, racial prejudices and religious differences between Catholics and Protestants prevailing in O'Connor's time. In "A Good Man is Hard to Find" O'Connor draws the attention to violence which is "capable of returning characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace". (O'Connor, p.413)

The story takes place in the South of the USA which was not only known in the 50's under the name of the southern Bible Belt, but was also associated with a fundamentalistic view on Afro-American people. During this period the southern society was changing immensely, partly because in 1954 a legal law for the abolishment of segregation was passed and the Civil Rights Movement, lead by Dr. Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks, had its peak in 1955. However, not only political changes took place but also economical ones. Due to post World War II prosperity America was facing an abrupt growth of the number of cars on American roads. This change in mobility modified the society's attitude and its culture. The characters depicted in "A Good Man is Hard to find" adjust to the new way of life and as a typical American family, though disintegrated - as they are ignoring each other and the characters are only family in namesake since they only tolerate each other, they are going on a family trip to Florida.

Worth mentioning is the fact, that all characters in this story but the grandmother have a name. The reason being, that the latter is depicted by O'Connor as a grotesque representative of ignorance and religious platitudes of many Southerners in the state at the time. When the grandmother tells June Star that "little niggers in the country don't have things like we do," she reveals a view many people in white society held in 1955 (paragraph 20). By putting Southern gentility in this light, O'Connor portrays the South as a desolate place, where people meet by chance and youth "wouldn't live in a broken-down place like that for a million bucks!" (paragraph 31, p.367).

On their way the family encounters several incidents and undergo transformation. In a restaurant, the grandmother discusses with Red Sam the decay of society and they state that: "You can't win... these days you don't know who to trust" (paragraph 36). Furthermore, they blame "Europe" that "A good man is hard to find...[and that] everything is getting terrible. [They] remember the day you could go off and leave your screen door unlatched. Not no more" (paragraphs 43, 44).

When they leave the restaurant they are involved in a car accident, in which, to the children's displeasure, "nobody's