Ain't that the truth?" The grandmother responded, "People are certainly not nice like they use to be."(Bedford, 561) Red Sammy explained that he had let a couple of guys charge their gas and questioning why he had done such a thing. Red Sammy concluded, "A good man is hard to find.Everything is getting terrible. I remember the day you could go off and leave your screen door unlatched. Not no more."(Bedford, 562) The conversation between the grandmother and Red Sammy clearly conveys the nature of O'Connor's purpose to the story. She is evidently trying to say to be careful of who to trust. .
The ironic ending, when the family is killed by the person the grandmother had feared throughout the story, is not the only ironic instance in the story. The ironic point that O'Connor is trying to make is that there are more untrustworthy men then there are trustworthy. The irony is the fact that of all the people that family happened to break down near was a bad guy. This may sound like an obvious statement, but the obvious ironic event is that they broke down near the Misfit. The family was out in the middle of nowhere and they had an accident near a bad guy, not a good guy, therefore the title could be read another way to prove Flannery O'Connor's point, "A Bad Man is Easy to Find". .
Flannery O'Connor's short story collection A Good Man is Hard to Find has many elements of a southern gothic work. Images of ancient castles with sliding panels create suspicious themes and settings that lead the readers into the dark and gloomy world of the southern United States. With all of the violence, horror, and dismal surroundings presented in O'Connor's stories there is too a moral message given. Later gothic work did not always explain horror like this, holding little moral value to contrast their grotesque images (notes, November 1). O'Connor's stories do include a strong moral element, frequently in the form of religious explanations.
