A Good Man is Hard to Find

A recurrent theme in this short story is values and morals. The children in this story have no respect and their parents don't make an effort to correct these children or try to reprimand them for their actions. The grandmother herself puts her values in looking ladylike. On their trip the grandmother has "on a navy blue straw sailor hat with a bunch of white violets on the brim...Her collars and cuffs were white organdy trimmed with lace... [so that] anyone seeing her dead on tthe highway would know at once that she was a lady" (O'Conner 3). Yet her actions are very selfish as she tries to get the family to go to Tennessee and she lies to the children to go visit some house. She's also racist as she comments, "Little niggers in the country don't have things like we do" (O'Conner 4). The grandmother also values money as she talks about Mr. Teagarden and she says she would've done well to marry him because "[he] had bought Coca-Cola stock when it first came out and that he had died only a few years ago, a very wealthy man" (O'Conner 6).
Throughout the story there are more characters with bad morals. "The misfits" have improper morals as they murder the family, but there's also Red Sammy. The restaurant has a nickelodeon, but in the story it says the "children's mother put a dime in the machine and played" (O'Conner 6). A nickelodeon should only take a nickel to play a song, but the mother puts a dime in which shows that they have been conned into paying more and Red Sammy's wife says, "it isn't a soul in this green world of God's that you can trust and I don't count nobody out of that, not nobody" (O'Conner 8).
Near the end of the story there were religious themes and symbols that played out in the short story. The grandmother is selfish because even when she hears the pistols and knows that her family is dead she keeps crying out to The Misfit to save her. Then there's the point in the story when it says, "His voice seemed about to crack and the grandmother's head cleared for an instant" (O'Conner 21) where the the grandmother's mind becomes pure. She becomes almost God-like as she says, "Why you're one of my babies. You're one of my own children!" (O'Conner 22). I think it is a symbol that she has been forgiven for all her sins and so she is able to become an image of God as she says those things to "The Misfit." The Misfit is afraid and rejects this religion though as he adverts the grandmother and shoots her three times and also as he always says "children make me nervous" (O'Conner 14) and children are sometimes symbols of purity as they're young and have less sin than older people.
Some symbols that I saw throughout the short story were things like the name Toombsboro where it resembled the word tomb and the family did end up dying. Foreshadows of death when it said, "anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady" (O'Conner 3). Lastly, when it says "behind them the line of woods gaped like a dark open mouth" (O'Conner 14) because all of the family members except the grandma died in the woods.