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IT is not difficult to label the agent of evil in Flannery O'Connor's signature story, "A Good Man is Hard to Find." An escaped convict, self-named the Misfit, dispassionately orders the murder of a Georgia family - everyone from grandmother to baby - after coming upon them when their car overturns along a dusty country road. The Misfit orders the murders because the Grandmother has, foolishly, recognized and named him, and also to steal the family's car. But as in all of O'Connor's stories, the violent surface action only begins to suggest the depths and complexities of meaning embedded in the story. This is especially true when considering the mystery of evil and its relation to the action of grace.
On one level the story's title refers to the words of a popular song - "A good man is hard to find / You always get the other kind." But on another level it also suggests Christ's rebuke to Peter when Peter tried to call him good, and Jesus responded that no one should be called good (Mark 10:18) - a mistake the Grandmother makes repeatedly in her encounter with the Misfit. At the same time, it is also true to say that, excepting Satan, no one should be called totally evil, certainly not in any absolute sense. Good and evil, as potentialities and as actualities, are inextricably inter-twined in human beings, and this is true for both the Grandmother and the Misfit. It is more accurate to speak of gradations of human good and evil, and of the drama of choice in the face of competing moral options. O'Connor's story explores a range of these options and their consequences, as well as suggesting the mysterious invisible forces beyond personality and circumstance that help to shape human destiny.
A central principle of O'Connor's Catholic theology, expressed by St. Thomas Aquinas and other theologians, is that evil has no being, and that evil always appears as a good to the one who commits it, i.e., as something good for him. Granted this principle, one can see that the Misfit's murderous actions are committed under the delusion that somehow they will reap some good for him, and somehow answer to his need. But stealing the family's battered...