Dialogue in "A Good Man is Hard to Find"

      Flannery O'Connor's short story "A Good Man is Hard to Find" uses dialogue in an interesting way.   For much of the story, the grandmother will not stop talking.  Instead she chatters away as her son and his family ignore her.  The narrative, while giving her a voice, also ignores her with lines like, "If I could paint, I'd paint that picture" being followed by unrelated action: "The children exchanged comic books."  However, it is her voice that leads them to the Misfit.  Leading them to a plantation that is actually in Tennessee, she tricks her grandchildren into wanting to go.   This story has a lot of tension surrounding the grandmother because she is from an older, more racist and classist, generation, while at the same time she is a pitiable character being routinely ignored and belittled by her family.
        The conflict between dialogue and action also speaks to the power dynamic that is present once they meet the Misfit.  The murder of the rest of the characters is implicit, signaled only by the shots in the woods, while the grandmother attempts to convert the serial killer.  The pacing of her dialogue builds tension throughout the work, coming quicker and quicker towards the end, signaling the hysteria that she feels.  She is simultaneously ineffectual and deluded, working on referent power dynamics that are no longer important, such as telling him "I know you are a good man. You don't look a bit like you have common blood." This emphasis on his social class highlights the disconnect between the two characters: the grandmother things that if she tells the Misfit what kind of man  he is, he won't kill her family.  The Misfit does not care.