SOURCE: "The 'New Jesus'," in Flannery O'Connor: Voice of the Peacock, Fordham University Press, 1982, pp. 69-76.

Feeley is an American author and educator with a special interest in the work of Flannery O'Connor. In the following excerpt, she views "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" as a clash between "a romanticist creating her own reality and an agnostic cut off from spiritual reality."

A romanticist creating her own reality and an agnostic cut off from spiritual reality come into violent conflict in the title story of the first collection of O'Connor short stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find. One of her most perfectly wrought artifacts, it relates the meeting of a vacation-bound grandmother and her family with the Misfit, a psychopathic killer. A piece of comic realism, the story explores the characters' apprehension of reality—both natural and supernatural. The grandmother dominates the first half...