preview

`` A Good Man Is Hard, And `` Young Goodman Brown ``

Better Essays

Evil in “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and “Young Goodman Brown” The short stories “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O 'Connor and “Young Goodman Brown” by Nathaniel Hawthorne both include characters who are greatly affected by the battle between good and evil. “A Good Man is Hard to Find” tells the story of a family 's seemingly normal car trip turning in a tragedy of blood shed after they come face to face with evil himself in the form of The Misfit, a violent killer who has escaped from prison. “Young Goodman Brown” tells us about a young man who has to face evil in himself and those close to him after he travels down an evil path while traveling through the forest. Both stories show how personal choices and chance encounters put people in the path of evil and can be life-changing and in some situations even life-ending. Although the journeys within the stories are different, the characters in both are plagued with misfortune and chaos because they chose a certain path. In “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, the story starts out comical and somewhat lighthearted. The grandmother, her son, his wife, their two kids, and the grandmother 's cat, Pity Sing, which she hid in her basket for the ride. Along the way, she talks her son into detouring to see a plantation she had visited as a young girl. She suddenly realizes the house is in Tennessee, not Georgia. She gets upset at this thought and jump disturbing the cat. The cat claws her son and it causes him to wreck the car.

Get Access