Flannery O’Connor’s Catholic upbringing influenced almost all her fiction, often garnering

criticism because of her stark, sometimes harsh portrayal of religion. O’Connor’s great-
grandparents had been some of the first Catholics to live in Milledgeville, Georgia, and her family
stood out in the predominantly Protestant South. O’Connor attended parochial school and
frequently went to Mass with her family. Although her stories and novels are often violent and
macabre, they are rooted in her belief in the mysteries of belief and divinity. Moreover, her
characters often face violent or jarring situations that force them into a moment of crisis that
awakens or alters their faith. Moments of grace—a Christian idea—are pervasive, such as the
grandmother’s moment of grace in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” For O’Connor, writing was
inextricable from her Christian beliefs, and she believed she wouldn’t be able to write were it not
for this background. In a lecture about “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” in 1943, O’Connor said,
“Belief, in my own case anyway, is the engine that makes perception operate.” She also
attributed her desire to write to her Catholicism, writing once in a letter, “I feel that if I were not a
Catholic, I would have no reason to write, no reason to see, no reason ever to feel horrified or
even to enjoy anything.”

1. “I found out the crime don’t matter. You can do one thing or you can do another, kill a man or
take a tire off his car, because sooner or later you’re going to forget what it was you done and
just be punished for it.”

The Misfit speaks these words near the end of the story, just before sending the children’s
mother, the baby, and June Star into the woods to be shot. The Misfit has told the grandmother
that he had been punished for a crime that he can’t remember, and this is the lesson he has
taken away from it. According to the Misfit’s theory, no matter what the crime, large or small, the
punishment will be the same—even if one never remembers what one did. This idea of being
punished for an unremembered crime alludes to the Christian belief in original sin. According to
Christian theology, all human beings are born sinners for which they will be eternally punished.
Only through God’s grace can these people be saved. In this sense, humans “forget” their crime,
yet are punished nonetheless, just as the Misfit suggests. The grandmother has her moment of
grace when she recognizes the Misfit as one of her “own children,” recognizing how similar she is
to the Misfit for the first time. She isn’t morally superior, as she has always believed. Instead,
both are struggling in their own ways to come to terms with the difficult, often ambiguous tenets
of the Christian faith.

2. “She would have been a good woman,” The Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to
shoot her every minute of her life.”

This quotation, at the end of the story, reveals the Misfit’s understanding of what has occurred in
the grandmother’s final moments, and he seems to recognize two things about her. First, he fully
understands that despite her obvious belief in her moral superiority—which she conveys through
her self-proclaimed identification as a “lady” and religious instruction—the grandmother is not, in
fact, a good woman. She is flawed and weak, and her age grants her no particular rights for
respect or reverence. Second, the Misfit recognizes that when facing death, the grandmother has
the capacity to be a good woman. In her final moments, she foregoes the moral high ground
she’d staunchly held and instead embraces her and the Misfit’s common humanity. The Misfit
observes this shift and seems to realize what it means: if the grandmother could have lived her
life at gunpoint, so to speak, she could have gained the self-awareness and compassion that
she’d lacked.