A&P by john updike

This short story was written very informally that you feel as though you are having a conversation with the narrator. What I found very interesting while reading it is the attention to little detail, especially when describing the girls and their character. It was almost creepy to me how he noticed so many little details about the girls, and there was also some sexual attraction that could be sensed from the descriptions. It is a mundane story, girls come in wearing a bikini to a store to pick up stuff, but the way it is written, and narrated in a first person enables us to know more about the girls character, as well as the other cashier and the manager, while also learning a great deal about the narrator himself.

A & P

I love Updike's description of the way the third girl walks. He pays attention to the small details and this works to help bring the character to life. The reader is able to see this stuck up girl who thinks very highly of herself simply through a description of her feet as she walks. Updike characterizes this girl throughout the entire piece by describing her actions with great detail. He also describes specific parts of her physical appearance which work to show us her character. For example he describes how she wears her bathing suit with the straps pushed off of her shoulders. On the other hand Updike characterizes the main character through his speech. When the main character says that he quits and explains why the reader can see that he is not a very rational person.

Tone in A&P by Updike

A&P reads like a long monologue of an overgrown adolescent, and this tone is probably the element that makes the story logical and make the character come to life to me. At the beginning, I didn't realize that the protagonist/narrator was just a boy. He sounded, or pretended to sound older, almost detaching himself from any personal feelings from the three girls. He has a mix of judgment and admiration for "queenie," which elevates through every one of his descriptions of her. And at the end, when he decides to quit his job and the conversation with his boss finally implies that he is much younger than his tone at the beginning seems to suggest, the story comes together really nicely for me. From what I can see, Sammy comes in two parts - the old-sounding judgmental know-it-all who thinks everyone is silly and hilarious and the adolescent boy who might have a crush on the girl in her bathing suit. The resolution of the story becomes clear precisely because the adolescent boy in him has won over the other part. This goes well with the image of him stubbornly deciding to quit his job just to prove a point to his manager and thus making the story much more logical.

A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'connor

This story has a mixture of humor and dark events. It starts off by getting the reader to  understand the dynamics of this family. The grandmother appears to be an awful mother-in-law as she can't even address her daughter-in-law by name. The children seem to be a little spoiled, and the dad seems to have resigned from trying to control the people around him. Their road trip seems normal, and the accident unfortunate. The drama begins when the car full of the convicts pulls up. At first you think the men will help them, or at least just let them be, but the author takes us through a series of increasingly shocking but realistic events. The fact that the entire family including a baby and grandmother are shot in cold-blood murder is awful, and at the end of the story the reader is left  with anger at the grandmother because it seems like it is thanks to her mouth that the entire family dies. One can only imagine how the dead bodies will be found in such a secluded part of the forest.

In Response to "A Good Man is Hard to Find" by Flannery O'Connor

I absolutely love the moment of realization in a story, when the author gives that final cue you need to realize what he/she has been keeping from you until now.  In this story, that moment of realization happened for me just after the grandma says she recognized the man, but didn't know where she recognized him from.  In this story, that moment of realization was immediately followed by dread and fear.  When a character that the reader (me, in this case) has barely met evokes such a reaction, the author has definitely done something right.  I think the fact that I knew so little about the Misfit before his encounter with this family is what made him scarier.  I had no idea if he was going to actually fix the car or shoot them all at any moment.  My worries were proven right when he shot the grandma three times for touching his shoulder on page 1212.  The manner in which he has the rest of the family killed is equally chilling.  The point of view prohibits the reader from seeing what exactly is going on in the woods, which allows the reader's imagination to run wild.  Neither the grandma, nor the Misfit seem very concerned with the shots fired in the trees and this made it even less clear what precisely was going on.  I still had a small piece of hope that the family might be alive until the Misfit shot the grandma.  Until this moment, the reader is left to imagine what horrible fates may or may not have befallen the family already, and what may happen to the grandma next.  In this way, O'Connor does a marvelous job of feeding on one of our greatest fears" fear of the unknown.

"A Good Man is Hard to FInd" is creepier the second time

"A Good Man is Hard to Find" by Flannery O'Conner was very disturbing for me to read, but I found it to be even more so the second time I read it.  I think this happened because the first time around, there were a few things mentioned that I though were a little off, but the second time through, they hold intense moments of foreshadowing what was to come at the end of the piece.   For instance, it is mentioned that "they left Atlanta at eight forty-five with the mileage on the car at 55890" (617).  The first time, I thought this sounded like a police report sort of way to write out details.  Then I read that it was the grandmother who wrote this information down (617) and just kept reading, thinking it was odd and that maybe something bad was going to happen.  But after I knew what actually happens at the end- it really was a crime report!  That was creepy because it was like the grandmother was writing the future, and she was the one to suggest the path that was dangerous, so the irony is there as well as foreshadowing.  Also, it is mentioned that the grandmother thinks " in case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once she was a lady" because of the 'feminine'  way she was dressed (617).  At first, I read this as the woman being vain and the stereotype of an old-fashioned lady who always wanted to keep up her appearances.  The second time- foreshadowing! In a really gruesome way, too. 
In another thought, I strongly disliked the characters.  The older children are rude, and make stuck-up remarks about things like Tennessee being "' a hillbilly dumping ground"' and that the girl "'wouldn't live in a broken-down place like this [the restaurant/house] for a million bucks!"' (619).  Snobby!  The author did a good job of portraying these kids as mean through use of their dialogue. I also do not appreciate the grandmother's actions.  She seems selfish and unreliable by the end of the story.  At first, I thought she may be a nice person, one who even amidst a rude family still wanted to do things like tell stories and make jokes (as on 618).  But when the criminals catch them, the woman really seems to just look out for herself instead of trying to save her family (though such a horrible situation, who knows how one would react).  The woman pleads with the terrible man, that he is "a good man" and so on and shouldn't kill her (623).  Through use of dialogue, the author, rather than portraying the woman as cunning in her attempts to escape death, shows the woman to be frantic.  I think this sense comes from the repetition often occurring in the woman's speech (623-626).  The end was confusing to me.  I hated the criminals, and it disturbs me to think about them too much, because the ring-leader is too weird in the things he says- it was ambiguous and creepy (623-627).  The whole story was overall very disturbing.

Light Writing and Dark Happenings in A Good Man is Hard to Find

At the beginning of A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor I felt prepared for a juvenile story. The writing style is child-like in nature as is its protagonist, the old lady. As I was reading it I noticed very simple sentence structure, a basic vocabulary, and scarce use of commas. Everything sounded so plain that I expected maybe some cute hijinks to happen but nothing too serious. But lo, the power of understatement I was about to realize. 

The antics of the old lady in the beginning are put together with the care and gentle insult of a tale about a dear old family member. As I read through the story I couldn't help but smile at the quirky details that made me feel for the woman. I mean, for God's sake, she stows her cat away in a basket for their family road trip...this is comedic insanity. Her rationale is laughable too--trying to convince her son to travel to another state by mentioning a bandit supposedly on his way towards the one they plan to visit? 

The story begins to show its darker side at the car crash. More specifically, when the old lady begins to have doubt. For the first time she becomes embarrassed about her actions, what people are going to think about her, and this is when the whole world goes off kilter. The cat's kicked, latches itself to her son who is driving, the car flips, the mother is thrown out of the car with the baby, on and on. 

To make matters worse, the grandmother's skewed logic rings true in a cruel twist of fate--they meet the notorious Misfit. The story becomes heavily dialogue based and we are no longer in the realm of nostalgic stories and memories--we've reached the present where nothing is fixed. The Misfit plays a perfect Colonel-Kurtz-mixed-with-Batman's-Joker villain. He wonderfully plays off of the old lady's old-school racism at times, for instance remarking "Nome, I ain't a good man...but I ain't the worst in the world neither. My daddy said I was a different breed of dog from my brothers and sisters". Later on in his monologue he also shines through his simple, straightforward rebellion that seemed so radical through others' mouths: "I found out the crime don't matter. You can do one thing or you can do another, kill a man or take a tire off his car, because sooner or later you're going to forget what it was you done and just be punished for it". 

Tying the story off with the murder of an entire family was never an option in my mind at the beginning of the story. And through this simple tone I find the story becomes even more haunting. Good job, ol' Flanny boy.