The family, including Bailey, her grandson John Wesley, her granddaughter June Star, and her infant grandchild, tended to by her daughter-in-law, ignore her.

When they leave the next morning, the grandmother occupies the backseat of the family's car, dressed finely so that if she is killed in an accident, she can be recognized as a Southern lady.

She tells her grandchildren that when she was young she was courted by a man who, as an early owner of Coca-Cola stock, died wealthy.

The grandmother promptly declares Red Sammy "a good man", and the two reminisce about better times while lamenting the decay of values.

Later that afternoon, the family continues their trip before the grandmother falsely remembers a plantation being in the area, only realizing her mistake after persuading Bailey to turn down a rocky dirt road surrounded by wilderness.

She beseeches him to find solace by praying, but The Misfit is uncertain if Jesus Christ's power was real and unclear about his own purpose.

When his companions return, The Misfit, while holding the surviving Pitty Sing, says the grandmother "would have been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."

In a 1960 response to a letter from novelist John Hawkes, Flannery O'Connor explained the significance of divine grace in Catholic theology in contrast to Protestant theology, and in doing so, explained the offers of grace made to the grandmother and The Misfit at the climax of the story immediately after the already agitated Misfit explained his anguish caused by not being able to witness whether or not Jesus is savior and that it was by faith alone that he decided Jesus is not savior: Cutting yourself off from Grace is a very decided matter, required a real choice, act of will, and affecting the very ground of the soul.

[10] In her letter to John Hawkes, O'Connor explained that The Misfit did not accept the offer of grace in her story but that the grandmother's gesture did change him: His [The Misfit's] shooting her is a recoil, a horror at her humanness, but after he has done it and cleaned his glasses, the Grace has worked in him and he pronounces his judgment: she would have been a good woman if he had been there every moment of her life.

[8]The grandmother's gesture toward The Misfit has been criticized as an unreasonable action by a character often perceived as intellectually, or morally, or spiritually incapable of doing it.

For example, Stephen C. Bandy wrote in 1996, thirty-two years after the author's death: ... if one reads the story without prejudice, there would seem to be little here to inspire hope for redemption of any of its characters.

No wishful search for evidence of grace or for epiphanies of salvation, by author or reader, can soften the harsh truth of 'A Good Man Is Hard To Find.'

[15]Robert C. Evans observed: As its very title already suggests, 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find' (like much of O'Connor's fiction) is very much concerned with satirizing stale and clichéd uses of language.

[16]Compared to the superficiality of the family that engages itself in comic books, television quiz shows (e.g., "Queen for a Day"), movies, and the newspaper's sport section, an original thought, often a dark truth like Red Sammy Butt's wife saying nobody on earth can be trusted "And I don't count nobody out of that, no nobody" looking at her husband, has both comic and dramatic effects on the reader.

Evans noted, "A major purpose of the story will be to shake most of the characters, ... as well as O'Connor's readers, out of [a] kind of smug complacency.

The literal sense of the story's title and The Misfit's complaint, "If He [Jesus] did what He said, then it's nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him" both appear in a more constructive context in the New Testament story of Jesus and the Rich Young Man, suggesting that searches for the deeper meanings of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" might start there.

We go to the father of souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon.O'Connor used the epigraph to close her essay "The Fiction Writer and His Country", published in 1957 in The Living Novel: A Symposium, a book of statements by novelists on their art,[24] where she followed the epigraph with the closing sentence: "No matter what form the dragon may take, it is of this mysterious passage past him, or his jaws, that stories of any depth will always be concerned to tell, and this being the case, it requires considerable courage at any time, in any place, not to turn away from the story teller.

[26] A film adaptation of the short story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find", entitled Black Hearts Bleed Red, was made in 1992 by New York filmmaker Jeri Cain Rossi.

[citation needed] The American folk musician Sufjan Stevens adapted the story into a song of the same title on his 2004 album Seven Swans.

In May 2017, Deadline Hollywood reported that director John McNaughton would make a feature film adaptation of the story starring Michael Rooker, from a screenplay by Benedict Fitzgerald.

[28] In June 2021, death metal band Counterattack released a song on their debut album, World Erased, titled "Good Man" based on the short story.

In 1998 high school English teacher Andrew Grimm started up a band in Baltimore, Maryland, called "June Star," after Bailey's daughter.

"Clichés, Superficial Story-Telling, and the Dark Humor of Flannery O'Connor's 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find'".