Blog #4: Complicated-ness of a short story

"A Good Man is Hard to Find" is one of the most complicated short stories we read. Through her "reasonable use of the unreasonable," Flannery O'Connor spins a web of deceptively simple phrases that turn out to be important. For example, when the family is driving, they pass a graveyard with "five or six" graves in it; graveyards like these are common throughout the south. However, this seemingly unimportant mention of the graveyard is actually meaningful because it foreshadows the family's death: six people will die right off the side of the road. Through small mentions of reasonable items, O'Connor makes the story incredibly complicated.
For me, the ending was difficult to interpret. I could understand it to a certain depth, but past that, I couldn't seem to draw any conclusions. One point, where the Misfit says, "She would have been a good woman if someone had been there to shoot her every minute of her life." This sentence seemed to resist interpretation, and I couldn't figure out what he meant.
The title proved to be almost as complicated as the story. By saying "a good man is hard to find," is O'Connor saying that a truly good man or a truly evil man is hard to find? After all, while the grandma might have been good at heart, she certainly presented some selfish and ignorant personalities. Also, the Misfit doesn't appear to be truly evil, either, even though he goes around killing people. At first, he seemed like he wasn't going to kill the family until the grandma recognized him. His little remarks throughout the piece paint him as somewhat of a good person, even though he is also evil. Both the Grandma and the Misfit appear one way on the outside, while in reality, on the inside, they are quite different. This leads to the meaning of the title, that "a good man is hard to find."