A Good Man is Hard to Find Character Analysis
The main focus of the story A Good Man is Hard to Find is the grandmother. The story centers around her viewpoints on different things that take place within the story. The story begins with a disagreement between the grandmother and the rest of the family. The dispute is about where to go on vacation. The grandmother wants to go to Tennessee, and the other members of the family want to head down to Florida. The grandmother is worried about a man named The Misfit, an escaped prisoner in Florida she had heard about in the paper. “Here this fellow that calls himself The Misfit is aloose from the Federal Pen and headed toward Florida and you read here what it says he did to these people. Just you read it. I wouldn’t take my children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it. I couldn’t answer to my conscience if I did.” Despite the grandmother expressing her concerns and reading the family, the news article about The Misfit, the family chooses to ignore her fears and head on to Florida.

The second conflict that arises is a man vs. man conflict between the grandmother and her son Bailey. Another issue that comes up between them is the grandmother bringing her cat. “She had her big black valise that looked like the head of a hippopotamus in one corner, and underneath it, she was hiding a basket with Pitty Sing, the cat, in it. She didn’t intend for the cat to be left alone in the house for three days because he would miss her too much and she was afraid he might brush against one of her gas burners and accidentally asphyxiate himself. Her son, Bailey, didn’t like to arrive at a motel with a cat.” This sparks problems within the family. Bringing the cat is just one of the many issues that the grandmother causes that leads to more conflicts in the story.

A perfect example of the grandmother causing more conflicts is the fact that the cat, Pitty Sing, will later cause the accident that leads to the family’s death. “It’s not much farther,” the grandmother said, and just as she said it, a horrible thought came to her. The thought was so embarrassing that she turned red in the face and her eyes dilated and her feet jumped up, upsetting her valise in the corner. The instant the valise moved, the newspaper top she had over the basket under it rose with a snarl and Pitty Sing, the cat, sprang onto Bailey’s shoulder. The children were thrown to the floor and their mother, clutching the baby, was thrown out the door onto the ground; the old lady was thrown into the front seat. The car turned over once and landed right-side-up in a gulch off the side of the road. Bailey remained in the driver’s seat with the cat gray-striped with a broad white face and an orange nose clinging to his neck like a caterpillar. As soon as the children saw they could move their arms and legs, they scrambled out of the car, shouting, “We’ve had an ACCIDENT!” The grandmother was curled up under the dashboard, hoping she was injured so that Bailey’s wrath would not come down on her all at once. The horrible thought she had had before the accident was that the house she had remembered so vividly was not in Georgia but in Tennessee.”1) Revise and editat least oneparagraph (and up to the entire paper).Revision means “re-seeing” the content: choosing new words, rephrasing phrases and sentences; replacing old content and/or adding support, context, or detail to existing content; and correcting any errors on the original draft, from spelling/punctuation and grammatical errors to quotation/citation issues. Post your original paragraph(s) first, followed by your revision of that same passage.
2) Address at least 3 of the questions below in your main forum post, underneath your revised paragraph:

What was your biggest weakness in the original passage? Does your revised version address this issue?
What resources, such as books or web pages, did you find useful while attempting your revision?
What aspects of the revision process did you find most interesting and/or challenging?
What did you learn from the revision process? Do you think that future papers would benefit from applying the revision processbeforesubmission?

Remember: All textual references (quotes, paraphrases) should be cited in MLA format (in-text citations and Works Cited).