Temporality in“A Good Man is Hard to Find”

As a carefully designed work, Flannert O’Connor’s short story“A Good Man is Hard to Find”is a brilliant example for skillfully using narrative techniques to convey her Catholic faith. Mieke Bal’s theories of time in narratology provide a fresh perspective to explores the characterizations in Flannert O’Connor’s“A Good Man is Hard to Find”. Time functions greatly to the characterizations of the characters through the narrative text in terms of the story and the fabula. It helps to present the characters’ personalities by playing with the sequential ordering, rhythm and frequency. By using these narrative techniques, grandmother’s selfishness, her moral inanition and her considerations that she is morally superior to others is fully expressed to the reader as well as Misfit’s struggling and renascence to his disbeliefs of God and so on.