What O’Connor Designed: Scene Structure in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”

A breakdown of scene structure, tension, and character design in O’Connor’s most famous story.

Why This Scene Feels Designed, Not Improvised

The final scene of Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find is not simply powerful—it’s purposefully and precisely designed. It leaves readers not just reeling from the shocking outcome that O’Connor was famous for but reckoning with the philosophical structure beneath it. This is how real fiction works: not by sentiment, but by form. Using a scene-structure framework—POV character, goal, obstacle, and escalation—we can break down exactly why this final movement strikes with such devastating clarity.

The Grandmother’s Point of View: Exposure Under Tension

The grandmother—petty, racist, annoying, all about manners and cheap grace—is the point-of-view character in the closing scene, and her placement is critical. She has the most to lose. As her family is executed one by one off-page, she’s left alone with the Misfit. He isn’t just a threat to her life; he’s a direct challenge to her entire moral framework.

This is the engine: her emotional exposure under tension. O’Connor’s decision to anchor the POV in the grandmother—not the Misfit, not a neutral observer—is what loads the scene with such narrative intensity. The character arc is internal: smug, self-righteous superiority degrading into desperation, and then breaking open—however briefly—into something that resembles true grace.

At every moment, the reader is locked inside the grandmother’s point of view. Her thoughts, her panic, her manipulations, her final gesture—they control the emotional tuning of the scene. She isn’t just the protagonist. She’s also the architect of her own spiritual collapse. That tension—between agency and helplessness—is what makes the POV so effective.

The Goal Shifts: From Survival to Redemption

At the outset, the goal is obvious: survival. The grandmother doesn’t want the murderous Misfit to kill her entire family. She bargains. She flatters. She pleads. She offers money. She prays.

But as the tension escalates, something deeper begins to move. The grandmother shifts. Her line—“Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!”—is not a trick. It’s a crack in the wall. She stops trying to escape and starts trying to connect—because the tension of the scene has ruptured her both inevitably and completely.

This is what makes her goal so complex. Yes, she wants to live. But what she really wants—what emerges too late to matter—is redemption. Not performative righteousness, but the real thing: the grace of seeing another human being not as a threat, but as a soul. That goal shift—from manipulation to recognition—arrives just seconds before her death. And that timing is the tragedy.

The Misfit as a Philosophical Obstacle

The Misfit isn’t just a character. He’s an obstacle by design. He doesn’t merely threaten the grandmother’s life—he renders her moral logic obsolete.

Everything the grandmother believes about goodness, punishment, grace, and justice collapses in front of him. She appeals to sentiment, religion, class, family. None of it touches him. He is not irrational—he is coldly consistent. That’s what makes him terrifying.

The Misfit isn’t just an immovable wall; he’s the counter-argument. He stands as the philosophical consequence of a world where suffering is random, and belief is unmoored from action. As long as he’s in the scene, the grandmother has no way forward that doesn’t expose and rupture her.

How Escalation Drives Rupture

This scene is a textbook case of "No! And Furthermore!" escalation. The grandmother fails to achieve her goal—and then fails at the deeper version of that goal, too.

No!: She can’t talk her way out of execution. Her appeals to goodness, family, God, and money all fail. The Misfit shoots her three times in the chest.

And Furthermore!: Her attempt at grace—her moment of clarity—comes too late. She does not save her life, and she does not redeem her soul. Her moral framework fails under real tension.

That’s the brilliance of the scene’s design. The conflict escalates not from fight to fight, but from superficial to existential. From saving her skin to confronting her soul. The grandmother’s final moment is a rupture—not just of her body, but of her identity.

This Is Scene Design

The final scene works because every element—POV, goal, obstacle, and escalation—has been deliberately designed to collide.

The grandmother and the Misfit are not simply characters. They’re moral arguments. When they meet, the collision is inevitable. And yet the reader still hopes. Still negotiates. Still fears. Because the scene is not just tense—it’s designed to generate tension in the reader, too.

By the time the final shot is fired, we’re left not just mourning a character, but questioning the cost of grace and the architecture of our own beliefs.

Form, not Formula

This is what design looks like: not a formula, but form and under ever increasing physical and emotional tension. Every choice—POV, goal, obstacle, escalation—drives the story toward rupture. O’Connor didn’t improvise this. She designed it. And once you see the design, you can’t unsee it.

This is also why it works. The effect—pity, terror, emotional catharsis—doesn’t come from inspiration or chance. It comes from careful alignment between structure and consequence. That emotional weight is not in conflict with design—it’s the product of it. Fiction that endures is fiction shaped by craft. Every choice—POV, goal, obstacle, escalation—drives the story toward rupture. O’Connor didn’t improvise this. She designed it. And once you see the design, you can’t unsee it.

Want to see what I’m explaining in action?
You can read Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find here.