SOURCE: Sloan, Gary. “O'Connor's ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find.’ The Explicator 57, no. 2 (winter 1999): 118-21.

In the following essay, Sloan challenges popular assessments of O'Connor's The Misfit and instead depicts him as a primitive and dangerous character.

The Misfit, the bad seed in Flannery O'Connor's short story [“A Good Man is Hard to Find”], is commonly deemed a logician of no mean wit. He has been pictured as a modern Pascal who wagers wrong (Cobb), a rigorously empirical Doubting Thomas (Scouten 63), a mental “thoroughbred with a curious and active nose” (Currie 149), and an instinctive scholar plumbing reality (Jones 837). Other critics describe him as a rationalist who “has to know ‘why’” (Feeley 75), a thinker “recalling age-old debates about theodicy” (Johansen 38), as possessing “credibility and authority” (Orvell 132), “a scholarly awareness of alternatives” (Montgomery 12), and steadfast “lucidity” (Gossett 81). O'Connor herself seems to have envisioned her felonious tube a thinking-man's skeptic...