An Acute Angle in an Obtuse World
An Acute Angle in an Obtuse World
This world is full of hypocrisy whether it be value hypocrisy for instance in O’Conner Flannery’s short story “A good man is hard to find” or religious hypocrisy found in Langston Hughes short story “On the road.” We as a world live like this on a day to day basis pretending to claim or allege of having admirable principles, beliefs, or feelings to do something while doing the total opposite. Hypocrisy is prevalent though out the world and is very common; Flannery O’Conner and Langston Hughes only touch on two different types of hypocrisy, but yet two very common ones.
How do you define a good person? Money? Actions? Looks? Family? Belief? In Flannery O’Conner’s “A Good Man Is Hard Find.” The poetry of Langston Hughes as painted in Critical Survey of Poetry “…is charged with life and love, even when it cries out against the injustice of the world”(1435). Exactly how he portrays the grandmother in this short story, hypocrisy is wrong. She says she is a lady of good values, but rather she judges people on the many things that she claims to live by good morals and good character. Similarly in “On the road” the people in this story claim to be religious but it is clearly revealed that they are not. Hughes depicts Christianity as reality of how it actually is practiced by the Reverend Mr. Dorset, the observers at the church, and the police. Instead of practicing the Christian concept of being ones brother’s keeper, they deny Sargeant basic Cristian charity For instance in “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” when she tells the children that they don’t appreciate were they came from. She turns around and says “Oh look at the cute little picaninny!” (O’Conner 406) the same respect and appreciation that she speaks of the children she doesn’t have either. Does she forget where she came from? She was once like that little girl and sure enough I know if she was to be refereed to as a “Negro” or a “picaninny” she wouldn’t have like to be labeled as that. The grandmother defined a good man as being rich and not the richness for the values that he had, but the amount of money that he had. Should a woman with so many values be worrying about how wealthy a person is? For instance when she talked of Mr. Teagarden, yes she mentioned that she said “She would have done well to marry Mr. Teagarden he was a gentleman and….he had died only a few years a go, a very wealthy man” (O’Conner 407). But she seems to pay more attention that he was wealthy in riches not in spirit.
The first thing that came out of the speakers mouths in both stories when they introduced some one new to the audience was about how they looked. They were was always described in great detail in O’Conner’s details of what the grandmother has on “In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady”(O’Conner 406). Her appearance and the appearance of others seem to mean a lot as to what she thinks a good man entitles. Is that why a good man is hard to find? The description of clothing doesn’t end there. The grandmother introduces all the characters with great description of their clothing. To begin with the children’s mother which she described as though she was suppose to have on something more fitting she describes her as having on “slacks and a green head-kerchief” (ctd in O’Conner 405), or the way she described Red Sammy as having on “Khaki trousers reaching just to his hip bone and his stomach hanging over them like a sack of meal swaying under his shirt” (ctd in O’Conner 408), even the way she described the Misfit and his crew she describes their attire very carefully and to the last detail most people would have seen guns and forgot what they had on, but because she is so much of values their clothes is what drew the most attention to her. Also in Hughes “On the road” the reverend describes Sergeant as being “A big black man with snow on his face, a human