SOURCE: "'The Meanest of Them Sparkled': Beauty and Landscape in Flannery O'Connor's Fiction," in Realist of Distances: Flannery O'Connor Revisited, edited by Karl-Heinz Westarp and Jan Nordby Gretlund, Aarhus University Press, 1987, pp. 147-55.

Martin is an American author and educator with a special interest in O'Connor's work. In the following excerpt, he examines moments of epiphanic beauty in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find."

"'We've had an ACCIDENT,'" the children cry gleefully. "'But nobody's killed,' June Star said with disappointment." Within a few minutes, June Star is dead, and so is the rest of her family. This extraordinary irony informs the story in several ways. Like Eliot being surprised that so many have crossed the bridge or Ransom's characters being astonished at a child's death, we as readers of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" are awed by the swiftness and finality of the...