O'Connor's use of the adjectives "silver-white" make the sunlight appear harsh and somewhat threatening, "silver" perhaps like the cold steel of a blade. The reader feels almost as if it would be painful to look into such a light, or that perhaps such a bright, illuminating light might be more effective in exposing the sins and weaknesses of the characters. Once the accident has taken place and the characters themselves are facing certain death, all references to "sunlight" disappear and the story takes on a decidedly depressed feeling. The characters are abandoned to the whims of the Misfit under a sunless, cloudless sky. There is no sun, there is no higher power whose grace will save them from this cataclysmic event to which they are all about to be subject. They are alone and helpless - left to the mercy of an escaped psychopath.
The suns of O'Connor's stories are almost always "accompanied by a complimentary setting of a fortress line of trees beyond a field"(Asals 69), and her story A Good Man is Hard to Find, is no different. Call them trees, woods, forest, it doesn't matter. The fact remains that it is the trees that do much of the work creating tension and preparing the reader for the abhorrent conclusion of the story. O'Connor's descriptions of these menacing woods not only foreshadow what is to come, but become "ominous and ever more animated witness[es] to the grim actions"(Asals 68). In a passage quoted earlier, "the trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled"(119). The adjective "sparkled" might normally lead the reader to the image of brilliance or beauty (as in the way a diamond might sparkle), but not in O'Connor. The use of this word, coupled with the idea of mean trees, is a brilliantly malevolent image. The reader is left feeling as if the mean trees are sparkling in anticipation of some evil reward, anxious for their chance to "get at' the characters.