Friday Memories of Books That Shook My World
As I list books that shook my work, I don’t insist that I remember exactly where I was when first reading them. Nevertheless, when I do, it’s a good indication that the poem or story belongs in this series. I was a 27-year-old graduate student in the building that houses Emory University’s English Department when I sat down to read Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.”
It was a Sunday afternoon on a pleasant autumn day so the building was empty. I was in the graduate students’ lounge preparing to teach the story, which appeared in a fiction anthology graduate students taught. Because I had never encountered O’Connor before, I had no idea what to expect.
I emerged from the story half an hour later entirely disoriented. I remember stumbling out of the building in a state of shock as I made my way home. I felt that I myself had been in the Georgia countryside witnessing a psycho killer gun down a family.
Shock is O’Connor’s intended effect as the story’s opening gives no indication of what is to come. The early part reads like comic social satire as an unpleasant grandmother and her unpleasant family are preparing to take a weekend excursion into the countryside. A disagreeable narcissist, she trades jibes with the two older children, both thoroughly disagreeable themselves. Meanwhile, her long-suffering son takes the wheel. The mother, who carries a baby on her lap, is pretty much silent throughout the story.
Thanks to the grandmother’s faulty memory, the family gets lost. Then disaster happens when the family cat, which she has smuggled aboard against orders from her son, gets loose and jumps on him, causing the car to run off the road and flip over. His wife suffers a broken shoulder, the injury catching the reader off guard. Like the car, the story has veered into unexpected terrain.
It only gets worse. Three men find them and the grandmother unfortunately blurts out the identity of the leader, whom she has seen on wanted posters. Known as the Misfit, he is a killer who has escaped from jail. While the situation has changed, however, she remains as aggravating as ever, causing her son to swear at her. The Misfit might have killed the family anyway, but being recognized seems to seal the deal.
The father, mother, and children are taken off by the gang members, and we hear the shots as they are murdered. Needless to say, at this point in the story we have reached the point of no return.
O’Connor, however, still has a surprise awaiting us. It appears that only something this drastic can penetrate the grandmother’s narcissism, getting her to care for someone beside herself. Unexpectedly, her concern is for the Misfit:
His voice seemed about to crack and the grandmother’s head cleared for an instant. She saw the man’s face twisted close to her own as if he were going to cry and she murmured, “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!” She reached out and touched him on the shoulder.
The story is striking in and of itself, but I think other reasons account for why it affected me as deeply as it did. While I’m not the narcissist the grandmother is, like her I have lived a life of privilege, cocooned from the world by my education and middle-class upbringing. Until I graduated from college and married Julia, other people had been largely responsible for my well-being.
Meanwhile, my father’s hoping that his children would restore his innocence after witnessing the horrors of Dachau led me to close my eyes to human depravity. I had read about human evil, of course—the Birmingham church bombing, the Kent State killings, the My Lai massacre—but they were abstract. A short story somehow made evil real for me.
Because of this, the grandmother’s moment of compassion, comparable to Jesus’s forgiveness on the cross, felt all the more extraordinary. Although, like Peter, she betrays Christ—” Maybe He didn’t raise the dead,” she says to the Misfit after failing to soften him by invoking Jesus—in the end she understands Jesus’s love for the first time in her life.
Although I wouldn’t become a church member for another 15 years (I described myself as a secular humanist), the symbolism hit home. Maybe love was more powerful than death. My sense of disorientation arose over how the story shook up various certainties.
The Misfit is witness to this transcendent moment. The grandmother has penetrated the shield he has erected around his humanity, which is buried so deep he himself doesn’t know it’s there. I think of the final moment in the movie Dead Man Walking, where a man who has committed a horrific murder glimpses “the peace that passeth all understanding” in the moment before the executioner’s lethal injection ends his life. Sister Prejean has been telling him about God’s love throughout his time on death row, but only at the end does he get it.
The Misfit had thought that he and the grandmother are fellow narcissists and to this point he has been right. Terrified by the world her love opens up for him, however, he leaps back and kills her. Better to eradicate the new possibilities than acknowledge them.
The Misfit sprang back as if a snake had bitten him and shot her three times through the chest. Then he put his gun down on the ground and took off his glasses and began to clean them.
His wise but darkly comic summation shows that the moment has hit home. “She would of been a good woman,” he says, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
And then, because he has glimpsed the light before choosing to reject it, he sums up life from the perspective of one to whom the world appears darker than it ever has before. It comes as he chastises gang member Billy, who is experiencing a sadistic high from the group’s murderous joyride:
“Shut up, Bobby Lee” The Misfit said. “It’s no real pleasure in life.”
I was a long way from embracing Christian faith at this point in my life, but I can see how the story articulated my sense that my rational mind, with its materialistic understanding of the universe, could only take me so far. O’Connor took me into realms I had no language for. Episcopalian ritual and the Book of Common Prayer have gotten me a little closer.
Jesus has proved the good man who was hard to find.
Previous Posts of Books That Shook My World
A Teenager Pinned and Wriggling on the Wall (Nov. 6, 2026)
Tell-Tale Heart Terrified Me as a Teen (Oct. 30, 2026)
Why I Hated Catcher in the Rye (But Not Any More) (Oct. 23, 2026)
The Iliad Saved My Freshman Year (Oct. 16, 2026)
At 12 I Fell in Love with Taming of the Shrew (Oct. 9, 2026)
Alice Captured My Childhood Anxieties (Oct. 2, 2026)
How Tintin Gave Shape to My Sense of Wonder (Sept. 25, 2026)
E. Nesbit’s Formative Moral Influence on My Life (Sept. 18, 2026)
Lord of the Rings: Trudging up Mount Doom with Frodo (Aug. 28, 2026)
The Silver Chair and a Childhood Love (Aug. 21, 2026)
My Childhood Encounter with Wind in the Willows April 14, 2026)
