A Good Man is Hard to Find

“A Good Man is Hard to Find” is a short story about a self-centered and manipulative Grandmother who eventually is the reason for her and her family’s death, yet she manages to find “good” in the man who killed them.


Level One Question:
What is the Grandmothers only son’s name?

Level Two Question:
Why doesn’t the grandmother react when her son and her grandchildren are killed?

Level Three Question:
Have you ever been manipulated into doing things that you do not want to do?

The theme of this short story is that people can be selfish and can try to manipulate situations to benefit themselves or to try to change others.


In this short story, the family takes a road trip and the kids do many things to entertain themselves and it eventually leads to the parents getting annoyed. This reminded me of when my family used to take road trips to West Virginia or to state parks in Indiana. Typically, my brother and I would listen to our own music or do our own thing for the first part of the trip until we got bored. Then, we would play games with each other for the rest of it. We would play “I Spy”, tick-tack-toe, and card games. However, by the end of playing these games with each other, we would become annoyed with one another. We should start doing things to make the other mad, such as poking the other and saying “I’m not touching you” or by calling each other names. This would cause us to make a lot of noise. In result, this would start to annoy our parents who would then yell at us. By the end of the car ride, everyone would be in a bad mood and exhausted, and because of this we did not take many long road trips when we were young. Our parents decided flying was the best decision for traveling long distances.