Reactions to "A Good Man is Hard to Find"

"A Good Man is Hard to Find" is a very interesting short story.  In this story, chance plays a very big role.  So many things that happened were because of chance, and these chance happenings led to other chance happenings.  For example, there was a chance that Bailey would decide to not go down the road where the house with the secret panel was supposed to be.  When they did go down that road and grandmother remembered that the house was in Tennessee, their was a chance that she wouldn't have freaked out as much and that her cat wouldn't have sprang out of where it was hidden.  When the cat ended up landed on Bailey's shoulder, that was by chance.  This led to the car flipping over, by chance.  If Bailey wasn't as freaked out and if he controlled the car better, that might not have happened.  But, because it did, and because The Misfit happened to be there, he came over, and they eventually all ended up dead.  They definitely didn't mean to die that day, but as chance played out, leading from one thing to the next, they did end up dying.

Throughout the story, the words "a good man" keep popping up.  It seems like the grandmother's definition of a  good man is someone who is nice.  She calls Red Sammy a good man after he says that he let two people charge the gas they bought.  He was being nice to them, but in my opinion it still wasn't the right thing to do.  Also, she continues to tell The Misfit that he is a good man.  Her reason for this is that he comes from nice people.  At this point, however, I don't really think she really believes he is nice.  She is saying this just to get him to not shoot her.

The article, "Every Minute of her Life: Flannery O'Conner has an Epiphany(or Three…Thousand)," really helped me understand this short story better, and I after I read the article I went and reread the short story.  The article explains how when the grandmother was with The Misfit, knowing she would probably die, she turned into a good women.  She was transformed into a better person when in the midst of The Misfit, who she knew was dangerous, had a gun, and would eventually shoot her.  It makes a lot of sense.  Like The Misfit said, she would've been a good woman if someone was threatening to shoot her every minute of her life.  I think he said that because no one really is a good person all the time, but she acted good in his presence.  Overall, the article was very helpful, and this story was very good.  I'm still wondering, however, if there is a meaning in why the kids and their parents didn't seem to care about the grandmother, and why they acted so rude toward her(the kids acted badly toward everyone--especially June Star).