A Good Man Is Hard To Find

The story "A Good Man is Hard to Find" by Flannery O'Connor there are a lot of examples of it being southern grotesque. The first thing I noticed was how the kids are bratty, snobby, and rude to their parents and their grandmother.  And the parents are completely submissive to this behavior, the grandmother seems to be the only one to acknowledge the fact that children are disrespectful.  The grandmothers behavior is also southern grotesque because she makes a racist comment about a young African American boy, calling him a bad name, and made a statement as to why he wasn't wearing any pants.  She is also very manipulative.  When she wanted to go see the house that she was talking about she lied that there was family silver hidden inside the house; this got the children to throw a fit so that the father would change his mind and take them to the house, its essentially her fault that they ended up on the same road that the Misfit was on.  She also tries to manipulate the Misfit all to no avail when she's begging for her life and those of her family saying that "you've got good blood, I know you wouldn't shoot a lady." and telling him that if he prayed Jesus would help him.  And it's also southern grotesque when the Misfit and his two buddies kill the family one by one because the story goes from a family road trip/vacation to a story about murder and the Misfit has no remorse about what he's done to the family.

The Lottery

Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" concerns itself with concepts of magic and superstition and their place in society. In this story the townspeople once a year in June hold a "lottery" essentially to see which one of them is going to get stoned to death.   This lottery has been going on for ages and the townspeople and the people before them are so superstitious that if they don't do this lottery and if someone doesn't get stoned to death then they're scared the wont have good crops.  They think that by doing this ritual something magically happens and they always have a good crop season.  This superstition reminds me of today how some people do certain things like before a game because they're superstition and if they don't do those things then they're going to have a bad game.