Grace Within Your Grasp

In a religiously motivating storyA Good Man isHard to Find, Flannery O'Connor reveals how easy for a person to receive the grace from God, even though such person might have acted based upon questionable moral standards in the past. The main character, a hypocritical Catholic old lady, constantly corrects and criticizes the behavior of people surrounding her. For example, when John Wesley refers to Tennessee as "hillbilly dumping ground," (Gradner-Lawn 279), his grandmother says: "In my time, children were more respectful of their native states and their parents and everything else!" (Gradner-Lawn 279).However, she misleads her family into believing there was a secret room with hidden treasures in the old plantation's house, in an attempt to convince her son Baily to take a detour. A new routeends with a horrible car accident and stranded family is soon surrounded by a grand of bandits. Their leader, The Misfit, is a man with low morals who believes there is "no pleasure but meanness." (Gradner-Lawn 289). Although he lives by his standards, he also questions if Jesus did exist. A grandmother, ignoring a well-being of her family, pleads for her own life and tries to convince a criminal that he is "good man"who needs to "pray."A few moments before her death, she realizes her wrong doing and refers to The Misfit as "one of my own children" (Gradner-Lawn 289), which symbolizes a gained grace from God. At the end, The Misfit also appears to receive God's grace when he recognizes "no pleasure in life" (Gradner-Lawn 290). The moral of the story is simple - anybody can be saved, no matter how horrible are the past crimes.

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