Chapter 26:Irony

Lit/Prof

"A Good Man is Hard to Find"--Flannery O'Connor

In this chapter Foster talks about how irony trumps over everything else, every other chapter in the book has no meaning if irony is involved. He proves how significant it is by mentioning it several times throughout the book but saying that it was too big of a topic to handle and to wait until a later chapter. It is interesting that he decided to put irony as the last chapter of the book instead of the first since it is at the highest importance. Instead, he built up and used the as if it were the grand finale.

In “A Good Man is Hard to Find” irony plays a key role in how the story plays out. The story starts out with a family trying to make a decision on where to go on vacation, while the grandmother wants to go to Tennessee her son wants to go to Florida. In order to prove her case the grandmother says that they shouldn’t go to Florida because there is a killer on the loose named the Misfit. But the family disagrees and starts on their vacation. On the way there the grandmother continues to tell her stories about her past, about when times were better and when you could trust people. As she tells her stories she tells about a house that has a secret compartment that is only a ways down the road. The eager grandkids really want to see it but on the way the get into a car accident. A car comes to help, but in that car is the Misfit and he ends up killing all of them.

The irony all really starts when she begins talking about the Misfit and joking about how if they go to Florida then they might get murdered. Another ironic part of the story is at the beginning of the story when the grandkids were saying that the grandmother couldn’t stay home because she couldn’t miss anything, she always wanted to be involved. In the end though, this got her into a lot of trouble and because of her continuous talking and stories the Misfit decides to kill her. But the irony doesn’t end there, the reason they wreck their car is because they are going to the house with the secret compartment, which the grandmother later recalls is actually in Tennessee.

Foster saves this chapter until the end in order to stress the importance that irony plays in a story but also to give examples and relate to other chapters when explaining it. No matter what the intentions of the author may be, presenting irony into a story changes the level of comprehension and enhances the response of the reader.