up with her purse on the shelf in front of the window. The children’s mother still had on slacks and still had her head tied up in a green kerchief, but the grandmother had on a navy blue straw sailor hat with a bunch of white violets on the brim and a navy blue dress with a small white dot in the print. Her collars and cuffs were white organdy trimmed with lace and at her neckline she had pinned a purple spray of cloth violets containing a sachet. In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady.The parents pay little attention to the grandmother. When they do, they are quite rude. The unruly children represent a break down of the American family. Critic Webster Schott said of the family, “Their belief in their own virtue is a sign of their moral blindness. In pride they have separated themselves from God.”The grandmother in “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and Connie in Joyce Carol Oates’s “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” have many things in common and play similar roles. Both place a great importance on their appearances. They also meet a similar demise at the hands of a devilish character. It could be said, that if Connie had not faced her terrifying experience with Arnold Friend that she might have grown up to be much like the grandmother. As the old saying goes, “there’s no fool like an old fool”.Flannery O’Connor’s Misfit represents evil. He happened, upon the grandmother and her family, in a “big black battered hearse-like automobile”. Seeing him, the grandmother is struck by the feeling that she has seen him before. Soon after, the grandmother makes a fatal mistake when she commnets, “You’re The Misfit! I reconginzed you at once!” The Misfit replies, “Yes’m but it would have been better for all of you, lady, if you hadn’t of reckernized me.”...
