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Prompt 2: Theme

Although Christopher Marlowe’s play Dr. Faustus is about a fall from grace and Flannery O’Connor’s short story, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” focuses on redemption, both literary works make similar arguments about evil and grace. Respond to this statement, illustrating how both authors use different techniques and different plots to arrive at similar themes.

Samuel Cashman Professor Miller EN 110 April 10, 2007

Misfits

Read together, Flannery O’Connor’s 1953 short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and Christopher Marlowe’s 1593 tragedy of “Doctor Faustus” provide a case study in the varying ways in which writers can utilize technique and manipulate focus while presenting like thematic elements. Marlowe’s play, for example, features numerous sections in which major spiritual concerns are explicitly given space. His Faustus directly addresses the prospect of eternal damnation, lamenting the unknown horrors that will face his soul. On several occasions, he does so while good and evil angels quite literally argue the cases for their respective paths. The

Doctor’s personally explicated failures to choose the side of God and good lead the reader along through his archetypal fall from grace. O’Connor’s story however, manages to explore similar themes (the nature of evil, the possibility of redemption by God’s grace), while employing a notably different tact. Dispensing with the openly articulated ideological interplay seen in

Marlowe, O’Connor lets the layers of her work’s meaning emerge from her narrative. Couched in brutal violence, the story offers as its conclusion a redemption that makes sense as part of a specific fictional environment. Meta-questions are examined through the mechanics of story telling. Though she does not hide her work’s thematic currents, O’Connor prefers to let them emerge organically (though she does alert her reader through a leading epigraph). Despite these different modes of presentation, and although Dr. Faustus is about a fall from grace while “A

Good Man Is Hard to Find” focuses on redemption, both literary works make similar arguments about evil and grace.

O’Connor’s story begins with a quotation from St. Cyril of Jerusalem, a Byzantine Greek cited as an apostle to the Slavic people:

The dragon is by the side of the road, watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you. We go to the Father of Souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon. (O’Connor 195)

While the monk himself appears to have little connection to the fallen modern world O’Connor describes, his words offer a symbolic primer of sorts on how to read the story that follows. The action closely mirrors the epigraph. The “Misfit”, an escaped criminal, waits by the side of the road. A car passes, carrying a family. Its driver misjudges the road. The car flips. The Misfit and crew intervene. The dragon sends the family to the “Father of Souls.” Standing alone, these actions have a surface quality of meaningless horror. An unlikable family is needlessly, brutally slaughtered at the quasi-mystical whim of a man named for his inability to fit in. The murderer’s henchmen seem to get off on the killing. Conversation characterizes the world as a place that has seen better days (199). The narrative possesses a hellish character. Still, a purely nihilistic reading of the text ultimately fails to be compelling. Using O’Connor’s chosen epigraph as a guide one can begin to intuit the ways in which meaning rises from the horror. Cashman3

As telegraphed in the quotation from St. Cyril, O’Connor’s story, as bitter and nasty as it can seem, rather openly suggests a religious reading. Most significant would appear to be the moment at which one is forced to “pass by the dragon.” In “A Good Man,” this situation emerges in the extended, revealing confrontation between the Misfit and the Grandmother

(whose perspective the story most closely details). Stuck in the middle of nowhere thanks to her fateful insistence on searching out an old farm house (actually in another state), the Grandmother is forced to beg the Misfit for her life, even as she realizes her family is being slaughtered by his henchmen. Echoing an earlier conversation she has had with an abusive restaurateur named

“Red Sammy” at his rest stop, the grandmother beseeches the Misfit on the grounds that he appears to be a man of quality: “I just know you’re a good man… You’re not a bit common!”

Her assertion directly contradicts the disposition she earlier demonstrated. For she and Red

Sammy quite agreed that the world has gone to hell in a hand-basket. The pot-bellied entrepreneur neatly summarizes: “A good man is hard to find…Everything is getting terrible”

(199). Yet, the grandmother, in the most desperate of circumstances, reveals a deluded optimism. The Misfit most certainly does not meet any ordinary person’s definition of a “good man”.

What follows is an education by elimination. The Misfit talks. He is mostly polite. He is honest. Life is a bum-ticket. He feels he has been unjustly punished. He has a coda: “I call myself the Misfit… because I can’t make what all I done wrong fit what all I gone through in punishment” (206). If the one cannot readily believe in his justification, one equally cannot deny his humanity. As her death approaches, the grandmother becomes increasingly hysterical, spurring the Misfit to correspondingly give expression to his own demons. The frenzy peaks in the Misfit’s lament that he was not around to see Jesus: “if I had been there I would have known and I wouldn’t be like I am now”. His revelation triggers something in the grandmother. Her head clears. She stares into the killer’s twisted face, and suddenly it dawns on her: “Why you’re one of my babies” (207). The Misfit promptly shoots the life out of her.

In the very horror of her own murder the grandmother can be seen to have found (in that fleeting moment) a revelatory understanding of the world. She recognizes the folly of her previous classifications (good men, good families), and begins to understand her common status with the rest of an essentially evil world. In her naming of the Misfit as her child, the grandmother displays a capacity for forgiveness that offers the potential for transcendence. Even the Misfit recognizes that something important has happened, frankly remarking, “she would have been a good woman… if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life”

(207). Stripped away, the grandmother, whose presence henceforth had caused little but trouble and dissent, finally seems to find room for grace to enter and carry away her soul. Of course, there remains a level of ambiguity. As the critic Frederick Crews reminds us, there remains reason to ask whether “in calling him “one of my own children” just before she is killed… the

Grandmother [is] surmounting her earlier vanity and expressing a Christ-like grace or… simply continuing to plead selfishly for her life” (Crews 162). Still, taking stock of the evidence, particularly within the context of the leading epigraph, the view towards transcendence reads most probable, and ultimately, most satisfying.

If O’Connor’s story can be taken to provide a model of grace emerging from violence, then

Dr. Faustus can be read as an examination of an individual’s refusal to accept such divine Cashman5 overtures. Pushed to the brink of eternal damnation, Marlowe’s Faustus proves, even then, to have no stomach for redemption. Not fundamentally evil, he instead lacks the bravery to confound the horrid fate his hubris condemns him to. Even his fall contains passive elements. Though Faustus certainly chooses his fate, his choice of evil (like the Misfit’s to some extent) has the feeling of something he has been swept into, and then fails to control. In fact, Faustus, in spite of binding his soul to Lucifer, finds few of the meaningful answers he hoped for in making the bargain. When he asks Mephistophilis (the devil he deals with) of the nature of the world, in response he hears only an echo of (then) contemporary science. In regards to the question, “who made the world?”

(Marlowe 239), the devil exercises complete silence. The dread creature cannot offer any information “against our kingdom.” The implication is obvious: God created the world. Faustus should have known that already. Instead, the agents of evil (hell) have compelled him to question, and the questions drive him to the point that he has to know, whatever the cost.

Like O’Connor’s Misfit “who wouldn’t be like [he is]” if he only could have seen Jesus, the tragic Dr. Faustus loses control of himself in the face of a deficit of knowledge. Creation possesses mysteries, and the lack of certainty provides space for evil. Faustus cannot be sure of the existence of God, so he feels false safety in his transgression. Given the opportunity to turn back to good and save his soul, he gives in to Mephistophilis instead, insuring an eternity of punishment. His questioning nature seems to preclude faith, and blocks him off from grace.

The scholar Margret Anne O’Brien makes a related point in her article “Christian Belief in

Dr. Faustus”, arguing that Faustus (until his death) remains “a wayfarer… liable to conversion; in that his intellect is superior and highly trained, the likelihood of a repented choice is questioned.”

Concluding, she suggests that “[t]he cold deliberation which obviously precedes his choice of Satan further makes the chance of his repentance remote” (O’Brien 5). While she clearly suggests a level of intellectual stubbornness (on the part of Faustus), the critic’s formulation also seems to gesture at something more ethereal. Grace requires a level of surrender, a degree to which one concedes natural limitation. So while O’Connor’s grandmother finally breaks down (perhaps finding redemption), Faustus, so wrapped up in his personal quest, never can quite escape the downward thrust of his destiny.

Speaking of her body of work as a whole, O’Connor once cited “the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil” as the principal subject of her fiction. The epigraph discussed earlier provides a useful guide in the search for that “grace”. Namely, the very terror that

O’Connor exposes her reader to becomes the mechanism by which redemption begins to emerge.

In Marlowe, despite the essentially negative focus, grace responds to similar stimuli. The spectacular failure of Faustus’ life does not cause God to shrink from him, but rather seems to increase the fervor of His appeal. The effort is necessary. As O’Connor’s “dragon” waits by the roadside, Marlowe’s devils are only too ready to be conjured, and they act perhaps even more aggressively. Amongst that kind of evil, grace finds those who, through whatever impetus, manage to open their minds and hearts.

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Works Cited

Crews, Frederick. The Critics Bear it Away. Random House: New York. 1992.

Marlowe, Thomas. Doctor Faustus. Ca. 1593. In Beiderwell and Wheeler. The Literary Experience. Thompson-Wadsworth: Boston. 2007. Pp. 219-259.

O’Brien, Margaret Anne. “Christian Belief in Dr. Faustus”. ELH, Vol. 37, No. 1. (Mar., 1970), pp. 1-11.

O’Connor, Flannery. A Good Man is Hard to Find. 1953. In Beiderwell and Wheeler. Pp. 195-207.