A.+Eades

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SUMMARY In this short story, Flannery O’Connor takes readers to the home of Mrs. Hopewell. She lives in her home with her daughter, Joy. Joy was in a hunting accident at a young age and has only one leg. Their “maid” Mrs. Freeman and her two daughters make regular appearances in the house almost all day. On a normal day at the house, a bible salesman comes to the Hopewell home. Mrs. Hopewell is quite religious, but Joy, who changed her name to Hulga, is an atheist who denies God. Mrs. Hopewell lets the salesman in her home and begins to feel sympathy for his “good country” and “simple” nature. She invites him to stay for dinner where he becomes fascinated by Hulga. Before he leaves, he asks her if she wanted to go on a picnic with him the next day. She agrees to and he leaves. The next day he meets Hulga at the end of her drive and they walk together for some time in the woods. The salesman is quite fascinated with Hulga and starts asking her somewhat intimate things. He kisses her and she doesn’t respond negatively or positively. They keep walking until they come upon a barn, and they eventually climb into a loft. Hulga, despite her disability, is able to climb up. Hulga begins thinking of trying to seduce the simple minded, innocent man. The salesman quickly responds in the way she wants. The story takes a quick twist when the salesman ask Hulga to show him how she takes her prosthetic leg off. When she does, he takes it off, pushes it aside, and then reveals that he is actually an atheist himself. Hulga demands her leg be put back on, but he refuses and eventually steals off with her leg and makes the note that he does this regularly because he has a fascination with fake human body parts. He leaves Hulga in the barn and runs away with her leg in his bible case, which was really full of fake bibles filled with liquor. While he is running away, Mrs. Hopewell and Mrs. Freeman see him and talk about how “good country people” and “simple people” like him are hard to come by.

COMPARISON The two stories are similar in the way that Christianity plays a huge role in both. In “Good Country People” religion is portrayed as a persuasive technique for getting what you want. In “A Good Man is Hard to Find” religion is portrayed as something that is unpersuasive. “Good Country People” portrays religion as persuasive through the character of Pointer, a fake bible salesman. He uses religion as a way to trick people into thinking he is simple, country, and ignorant. By using religion in this way, he is able to take advantage of their hospitality and their generosity. Also, he is able to devise plans to get people alone so he can take advantage of them and then steal things from them. “A Good Man is Hard to Find” portrays religion as entirely unpersuasive through the character of a grandmother. The grandmother believes that she can persuade an escaped convict to not kill her and her family by telling him to pray and telling him that God will forgive him if he prays. In the end, the convict kills her and her whole family. O’Connor uses very similar characters in the two stories. Mrs. Hopewell believes that she is better than most people because she is a Christian and she is educated. She is very similar to the grandmother in the other story because the grandmother thought that she was “good” because she was a lady and she had religion. The themes of these two stories are very. The theme of both stories is that the world’s definition of good is not always true. In “Good Country People,” O’Connor uses someone who is believed to be good as a villain. In “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” O’Connor uses Red Sam, a character who yells at his wife, to represent the grandmother’s definition of good. Also, she uses the grandmother to represent the world’s definition of good because the grandmother thinks she is better than most people because she’s a Christian and she’s a lady.

PHOTO We chose the apple because it represents the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. We chose this because this is the time when sin entered the world and humanity fell from perfection. This is a good representation of both of these stories because characters in them thought that they were perfect when really, nobody is without flaw in the world. Also, the fruit represents that humans aren’t a “good” thing in general. Everyone has some sort of evil or sin in them, and nobody can be perfect or good. People mistake goodness as the way people act and the way they look, when really goodness comes from the heart and human hearts are not good.