O'Connor borrowed her title from a popular blues song written by Eddie Green and recorded by Bessie Smith in 1927. "A Good Man is Hard to Find," as its name suggests, is a song about a woman's love for a man who inevitably betrays her and treats her so "mean" that she wishes he were dead.
The title's irony is evident when the family stops at a barbecue for lunch. Red Sammy, the restaurant owner, and the grandmother, have a platitudinous conversation about how "These days you don't know who to trust." When Sammy mentions two strangers he let "charge" gasoline the previous week, and asks, "Now why did I do that?" the grandmother's immediate response is, "Because you're a good man."
Irony is underscored when Red Sammy mops off his sweating face and yells at his wife-waitress to "get these people's order." Prophetically, Red Sammy declares: "A good man is hard to find." [...] "Everything is getting terrible."
The family's fate unfolds just outside of Tombsboro, when their diversion and accident place them in the Misfit's path. As her family members are led to the woods and shot, the grandmother pleads for her life, telling the serial killer, "you shouldn't call yourself the Misfit because I know you're a good man."
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