A Good Man is Hard to Find

The plantation house that the grandmother wants to visit symbolizes the Southern past. It is a very real relic of an outdated and lost past. Still, she wants to go and visit this remnant of her past and goes so far as to trick the children into wanting to go by lying about exciting features in the house. The grandmother eventually realizes with horror that she has made a mistake about the plantation’s location. The family, then, is driving toward a delusion rather than a real house.

The plantation symbolizes how attempts to recapture the past—especially the Southern past—are pointless. In fact, the events are foreshadowed when the family drives past a plantation cemetery near the beginning of the story and the grandmother tells the children that the plantation itself is gone. Chasing this phantom past is what results in the family’s crash and eventually their deaths. The author concludes, then, that an inability to adapt to changing society can be fatal.

The monkey is Red Sammy’s pet, who is chained to a chinaberry tree by the service station. The monkey jumps into the tree to escape the children and is last seen sitting in the branches eating fleas. 

Although its appearance is brief, the monkey, in many ways, symbolizes The Misfit. Like the criminal, the monkey does not know why it is chained up and imprisoned. Like The Misfit, it is assumed that the monkey would run away if it were able to get free from its chain. Both are also imprisoned by “good men”—the grandmother calls Red Sammy a good man, and The Misfit was locked up by men of law. In its final appearance, the monkey sits, unconcerned, eating fleas, mirroring The Misfit’s lack of concern later as he murders the family.