Things Darkly Buried: In Praise of “A Good Man’s Hard to Find.”
The ruins of life, darkly buried,
Transform themselves and demand the present. ...
--"Country Cemetery," Herman Hesse
In good fiction, things buried don't remain buried. More precisely than nearly anyone else I've read, Flannery O'Connor knew
this, practiced this. It seems to me that she also knew how fate works--that in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" the
grandmother's fate does not arrive from the outside but rather emerges from within, from the ruins of her past and her faulty
memory. It undergoes the transformation journeys require, and it demands the present: a moment-to-moment futurity in
which darkness must arise. Why it must is not explained. I believe it can't be. I have read and studied this astonishing story for
more than forty years, and now as a former teacher of Gothic literature and as a writer of commercial horror fiction, I want to
identify what continues to stick in my mental filter and what continues to elude me about O'Connor's narrative. When I read
it, I find myself in pursuit of the ineffable--that is what good fiction bids--it is what a good fiction writer must commit to. And
yet there is more. O'Connor convincingly depicts the modern monster that, along with the vampire, will not stay buried: the
malicious stranger. And she accomplishes her feat, as I will suggest, through nearly flawless technique.
From the opening page of this story, I'm carried along by things hidden, buried, unsaid, unsayable. O'Connor puts me in
contact with the inscrutable possibilities of detail. It begins when we are not told what The Misfit did to "these people" in
Florida. But, of course, we can imagine. We learn further that the grandmother hides Pitty Sing in the backseat, that patrolmen
hide themselves behind billboards and informed readers know that most of Stone Mountain is far below the surface of
Atlanta, hidden, if you will. We find that Red Sammy's face is out of sight beneath the truck he's working on and that there is a
secret panel in the grandmother's house of memory. Things buried complement the effect: for example, we speed by the "old
family burying ground" and discover later that The Misfit trio buried their clothes; The Misfit himself was once an undertaker,
and, most pointedly, he tells us that in the penitentiary, "I was buried alive." The litany of the concealed, unseen, unknown,
unspoken and the interred goes on and on, adding much, I believe, to the mysterious radiance of this tale.
But the tension truly ratchets up a notch when we find ourselves off the road, accosted by doom. At that point O'Connor
employs the technique of "buried action"--violence offstage, handling it as deftly as Chekhov in his plays or as Seneca long
before him. In the first instance of this technique, Bailey and his son, John Wesley, are taken beyond the "dark edge" of the
woods as the grandmother rambles on and Bailey's wife is silent--speech and meaningful action paralyzed, we assume. Deep in
the strained moment, The Misfit's face hidden, we hear one, then a second, pistol shot, and we are left at the mercy of our
imagination. This mode of buried action is then repeated a few pages later when Bailey's wife, infant and his daughter, June
Star, are also led away. The Misfit, terrifyingly calm, recounts to the grandmother how and why he tried to give himself a new
identity. Offstage, there is a "piercing scream" and a shot; we read another exchange of dialogue and then hear two more
shots. The horrors are hidden from us, but I find myself orchestrating a scene as brutal and nightmarish as I can withstand.
How effective are these moments of "buried action"? I never read them without suddenly becoming aware that I have been
holding my breath.
As one who continues to be galvanized by this story, I find that the central fire of O'Connor's technique burns most brightly
when the narrative focus shifts to The Misfit and a series of ritualistic, non-verbal moments that arise as if endemic to him. I'll
cite several and suggest how, for me, these moments generate a chilling effect. The first of a connected trio occurs just after
the grandmother says, "You wouldn't shoot a lady, would you?" I would maintain that speech and dialogue are not as
significant here as the following description: "The Misfit pointed the toe of his shoe into the ground and made a little hole and
then covered it up again." A few lines beyond this tiny and telling burial, The Misfit squats close to the ground and responds
to the grandmother's cloying deference by drawing "a little circle in the ground with the butt of his gun." Completing the trio
of acts, two pages later, following the grandmother's observation about living a comfortable life free of being pursued, we
read, "The Misfit kept scratching in the ground with the butt of his gun as if he were thinking about it." The "it," of course, is
calculatedly indefinite. And we find ourselves deep in the realm of the unspeakable.
My surface reaction to each of these moments is to freeze--as I would before a coiled snake--yet beyond the visceral is
something more, and I'm pleased to say that I'm not at all certain what. But here's a suggestion. In the course of The Misfit's
derelict life, we're told that he's "been most everything," including one who has "plowed Mother Earth." It seems not out of
