— Anonymous
The following response will be based on “Good Country People” by Flannery O’Connor. Firstly, I want to say that I am someone who does not like to read a lot. Whenever I read a text which consists of too many complex words, I tend to get bored as I keep going looking for those words meaning in Google. The text “Good Country People” was easy to read and had many lessons to learn which is why I connected to the text. When I first looked at the pages the short story had, I was like, “It’s going to take a lot of time and might be boring”. After that, as I started reading the introduction, I thought the text was not complex and would not be boring as I will understand the meaning of what the author is trying to convey easily because of the vocabulary of the text. Also, I connected to the characters of the text. The character of Hulga was who I connected the most because like her I used to feel when I a teen as if I was the superior one to everyone else. I thought that my friends were not as smarter as me. As for the character of Mrs. Hopewell, it reminded me of my grandmother. My grandmother used to always be good to whoever came to her house even if she had work to do. She would always help them financially if they let her know about the hardship they were going through. I remember that back in the days, my family used to look for security guards to look out after the house. As the place which we used to live in, it was hard to find people we could trust. There were people in the countryside who needed jobs as there were less jobs on the countryside and they wanted to come to the cities. After we hired one, we used to let them work and live in our house. Furthermore, we were looking for people to rent our apartments and always looked for people who were reliable and honest. All of these experiences are similar to the text and that is why the text was valuable to me. The text is great for the Great Works class because it has many themes which I think are very universal and most of the readers would find interesting. One of them was religion. The text gives the readers a glance into people who believe in God and to those who believe in nothing. The text makes you think and deeply analyze how religion affects the characters in the text. I got to understand how easily someone can use their religion to cause a distraction and manipulate only because the manipulator seems to believe in the same religion. Also, another theme the text has is society and class. As some would say that Mrs. Hopewell thinks the good country people as beneath her, but I think she likes good country people and finds it hard to find people who are honest and simple as good country people. Also, the character Hulga has a Ph.D. and thinks everyone else is not as smart as her. Furthermore, the text challenged me to deeply analyze themes like education, love, and identity along with the two themes I mentioned earlier. To conclude, the text is worthy student attention and should definitely be in the Great Works class as it is interesting and makes students think and analyze the themes found inside the text.