Foreshadowing in "A Good Man is Hard to Find"

To start off, I have to admit I’m slightly embarrassed that I thought I had not yet read Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” I had indeed read it in my creative writing class last spring. I remembered as soon as the first scene emerged: the grandmother and her grandchildren teasing her in the kitchen. I was relieved, however, because I knew having already read it, I could focus on analyzing it more closely this time. One of the questions I decided to answer for our upcoming small group discussions were about the use of foreshadowing, which I’ll discuss here as well.

There are some pretty obvious moments of foreshadowing in the story that stand out, but there are also many that require a fine tooth combing to catch. The following list is what I came up with:

• The first obvious one is when the grandmother warns her son about the Misfit heading Florida, and when she mentions what he did to “those people;” she is hinting that he could just as easily do the same to their family if they were to encounter him.

• June Starr says that their grandmother has to go everywhere they go so she doesn’t miss out on anything, which reiterates in the ending when the grandmother is the only one left alive after her family has been shot in the woods. She has to go everywhere they go, so it is clear she too will be shot and killed.

• The grandmother dresses up nicely so that “in case of an accident, anyone seeing her on the highway would know she was a lady.” She unintentionally is saying that she is prepared to die.

• On the way to Florida, they pass a graveyard. Ominous enough. What makes this more telling is that the buried correlates exactly to the family in the car – three adults, two children, and one baby.

• When the family reaches the diner, the grandmother plays “Tennessee Waltz” on the jukebox, which is a slow and melancholy song with ominous lyrics.

• The city the family crashes their car in is on the outskirts of Toomsboro. It could be argued this is deliberately used to signify the word “tomb.”

• When the Misfit’s car shows up to help them, it is described as big, black, battered and hearselike. This is foreshadowing at its best. The men carrying guns and the smirk on the Misfit’s face are also clear indicators to the reader the danger the family is now in.

• The grandmother mentions that the Misfit’s face looks familiar, which we later learn is from the newspapers and television.

• When the grandmother is trying to talk her way out of being shot, she says, “You wouldn’t shoot a lady, would you?” But the Misfit calls the mother “lady” right before his men take her and the remaining children off to the woods to be shot.

And lastly,

• The grandmother tells the Misfit she has money he can have, and he says, “There never was a body that give the undertaker a tip.” This is the last and final bit of foreshadowing, and the nail in the coffin (pun intended). There’s no doubt now that the Misfit is going to finish off the killing of the family with the grandmother.