"A Good Man is Hard to Find"

As I began reading this short story I was expecting an romantic love story, that is not at all how it turned out.  During the first few pages of the story you meet a family consisting of a grandmother, three children, a mother and father.  The dynamics of the family interested me, the grandmother played a big role throughout the story, but the mother maybe said two words.  The father seemed to be a grumpy, impatient man.  The setting of the story is primarily in a car as the family is on vacation.  One piece of the story that foreshadowed what would happen is when the author explained in detail what the grandmother was wearing on page 354 and even states "anyone seeing her dead on a highway would know at once that she was a lady."

The author also used irony during the beginning of the story when the grandmother threatens the children with the Misfit, the criminal who had broken out of prison.  At the end of the story the family is in a car accident and the Misfit is the man who approaches them on the side of the road and eventually kills them.

Irony was also used with the cat the grandmother had secretly brought along caused the accident to happen while the family was driving down a back road trying to find the plantation the Grandmother had remembered was in a completely different state.