Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is a short story concerned with Christian themes of empathy and redemption, particularly as experienced through the narrative arc of the grandmother character whose presence structures not only the story’s plot but also its most compelling themes. The grandmother’s narrative arc begins with her distaste at the idea of traveling to Florida where she does not believe anyone could take their children in good faith considering the rumored presence of a dangerous fugitive in the area. This demonstrates the grandmother’s “fallen” state where her motivations are grounded in social propriety and utility. For example, her reasoning for wearing such elaborate clothing on a car trip is rooted in a desire to distinguish herself as a “lady” even in death should they experience a fatal accident on the route south. This tendency to want to separate herself within society becomes even more evident when they pass a black child on the road whose pant-less state she attributes to a difference between black people in the country and people like those in her family: “Little niggers in the country don't have things like we do” (Flannery). Furthermore, she explains that the entire reason she noticed the black boy to begin with was because she thought he would be an ideal subject for a painting. And, while she doesn’t elaborate why this is a particularly picturesque scene, we can infer that it is because the boy is a confirmation of her privileged status as an elderly white woman with a well-to-do son who can afford to take his family on vacation. In fact, the grandmother’s brief encounter with the boy has a tourist-like quality: she experiences the boy only in quick passing but is seemingly able to extrapolate a great deal about his entire socio-economic status. Her analysis reads thus: the boy lacks pants because black people in the country are not only different from her family