A Comparative Essay about “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and “Barn Burning”

A Comparative Essay about “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and “Barn Burning”

Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and William Faulkner’s “Barn Burning” are two related short stories yet so different in some sense. Both writers set a quorum of debate on whether the themes of family ties and betrayal discussed there is a reflection of the current state of faith within most people. O’Connor presents the belief in the grandmother by the family members as the single worst mistake that they made. The death and misfortune that befell them could be attributed to that unwavering conviction that they had developed in the grandmother.

Not until they faced the wrath of Misfit, they had known the grandmother as an authentic and genuine individual who could rarely drag them into misfortune. Unfortunately, other than directing them to the right route to Florida, she used her tricks to hand them over to Misfit in Tennessee. Of course, she is no different from Sarty, presented by William Faulkner. Like the grandmother, Sarty’s actions caused the end of his entire family. By telling Major de Spain of the impending doom of his barn, Sarty won the respect of the community but drove his family into undesirable misfortune, death.

Even in the presentation of family ties and the associated betrayal by both O’Connor and Faulkner, there is a significant difference that ensues when their use of characters is considered. Any reader would agree that the grandmother, used as a traitor by O’Connor, pretends to remain loyal and firmly attached to the family until the end. Conversely, Sarty presented as a traitor by Faulkner, genuinely stays faithful to the family, but only for sometimes. He eventually chooses to sacrifice his family when he is faced with the dilemma on whether to adhere to the imperative law or to remain glued to family demands..

By scanning and scheming through the two short stories, the reader can quickly note the evil that both writers are attempting to reveal. In “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” the grandmother seems to have known Misfit for a very long time and his associated undoing.  The killings committed by Misfit are undoubtedly several, and no one has, so far, never bothered to halt such barbaric actions. O’Connor demonstrates, through this story, that the setting for the story is marked with a lot of insecurity issues, and no one is willing to take action. Faulkner equally demonstrates the thriving of insecurity in the setting of his story. The shooting of Sarty’s family members without a proper judicial process translates to lack of an appropriate system of justice in the area.

While many of us would expect our family members to be truthful and honest in both their actions and words, O’Connor and Faulkner demystify this inborn and misguided notion by laying bare the lies that parents and relatives could impart their generations. The grandmother in “A Good Man is Hard to find” pretends all along that she is the right person and yet she intended to clear the family members from the earth. Rather than getting them to Florida as agreed by the family, she delivers them to Misfit, which terminates their lives. Fortunately, she’s no exception. In “Barn Burning”, Abner, Sarty’s father, created a false image of himself for his son to admire

In “Barn Burning,” Sarty must decide whether loyalty to family or obedience to the law is the moral imperative. For the Snopes family, particularly for Sarty’s father, family loyalty is valued above all else. The family seems to exist outside of society and even outside the law, and their moral code is based on family loyalty rather than traditional notions of right or wrong. Snopes tells Sarty that he should remain loyal to his blood or family, or he will find himself alone. This threat suggests how isolated the family really is and how fully they rely on one another for protection, even when their faith in this protection is unfounded.

Blood in a literal sense appears as well, underscoring the intensity of the ties among family. For example, when the Snopeses are leaving the makeshift courthouse at the beginning of the story, a local boy accuses Snopes of being a barn burner, and, when Sarty whirls around to confront him, the boy hits Sarty and bloodies his face. However, after Snopes once again plans to burn a barn, Sarty understands that family loyalty comes at too high a cost and is too heavy a burden. He rejects family loyalty and instead betrays his father, warning de Spain that his barn is about to be burned. Only when Snopes is killed—presumably shot to death by de Spain at the end of the story—is the family free. They were loyal, but they still wind up alone.

Unlike William Faulkner, who only uses little imagery and foreshadowing in the presentation of the story, Flannery O’Connor seems to have a mastery of the two literature techniques and adequately explores them in “A Good Man is Hard to find.” O’Connor uses the family’s drive to Florida to foreshadow the death that would strike the members. He notes that “Outside of Toombsbaro she woke up and recalled an old plantation…” (O’Connor, 370). The word Toombsbaro in the story is just a town’s name, but if the word is broken down, it sounds a lot like “tomb”. A tomb is a burial chamber or a house for the dead. The author makes up this name for a town to foreshadow the final destination of the family members.

Also, while the family is driving on the road, “They pass a large cotton field with five or six graves fenced in the middle of it, like a small island”(368). The family, ideally, knows little above the graves, but at the back of the author’s mind, they symbolized impending death that they would possibly encounter. It is critical to note that the family had six members which arbitrarily translated to the six graves. O’Connor is making use of landmarks such as graveyards so that readers can relate the incidences that would strike the family.

In brief, O’Connor and Faulkner are quite reflective of the present family ties and societies in their stories. They indicate the weakening family bonds and the bad habits that disunity can propagate. In both stories, the misfortunes that come over the family members are directly or indirectly fueled by one of them; in fact, the most trusted ones. While people believe that family members should be the second line of defence after oneself, the two authors precisely show that the firm conviction vested in our relatives could be the easiest way to hand us over to the enemy. It is, therefore, important that such blood associations be censored and monitored to avoid making them conduits to propagating evil to the family.

Bibliography

Faulkner, W., Jones, T. L., Kagan, D., Coates, C., Riney, M., Whittington, S. & Werner, P. (1979). Barn burning (pp. 500-13). Learning in Focus.

O’Brien, Tim. The things they carried. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009.

O’Connor, Flannery. A good man is hard to find. New English Library, 1962.

Walker, Alice. “Everyday Use: For Your Grandmama.” Zhang Hanxi. Advanced English (I) (1999): 53-65.