SOURCE: Renner, Stanley. “Secular Meaning in ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find’.” College Literature 9, no. 2 (1982): 123-32.

In the following essay, Renner suggests a secular interpretation of the conclusion of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.”

Just as literature illuminates life, life illuminates literature, sometimes causing a shock of recognition that simultaneously verifies the author's imaginative vision and advances our comprehension of both the vision and the means employed to reveal it. A recent account in a Southern newspaper of developments in a murder trial casts such light on Flannery O'Connor's “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” a story that has proved particularly troublesome because O'Connor's statements about her intention in its violent climax enjoins an interpretation that does not appear to be supported by the logic of its own content. I refer to O'Connor's representation that at the moment of the grandmother's death at the...