Posted: March 8th, 2016

A Good Man is Hard to Find”

Short Fiction Analysis
You may choose to write about any story or 2 stories we have read for Class. “A Good Man is Hard to Find” ， “Revelation”, and “Good Country People” both written by Flannery O’Connor. You should be conducting a close reading based on evidence; however, this assignment covering a piece of fiction means you will need to isolate what part of the story or stories you wish to focus on more than you would probably do. You would not be able to explicate a whole story in a short paper, of course. The governing issue of this paper is entirely up to you but should result in a meaningful process of analysis and lead to a better understanding of the story or stories as a whole.
Whatever direction you go, though, the parameters of the assignment require that you put forward a thesis that operates by focusing on a part of story in order to understand the whole of this story. This thesis should work throughout the paper by careful consideration of textual evidence. There are several distinct organizational strategies that you could choose for this assignment:1. You could focus on one story and one element in it as a way of understanding the story as a whole,2. You could focus on two stories by different ideas and draw a connection between one element in the two in order to better understand each, 3. You could focus on a passage in a story or 2 passages om two stories om order to understand.
To begin with, think about which issues in which stories interest you the most and possibly what your convergences in content you see. Think of some point that needs further exploration or a question that remains unresolved in a story. Choose based on which stories you were most intrigued by.
Note: this paper is an argument. You are convincing us to see a story or stories the way you see it, and developing the implications of this reading somewhat. This essay is not a book report; it should be free of summary. Any time you catch yourself retelling events of a story, you should stop and delete everything back to your last interpretive/ critical statement.