How do the characters in Flannery O'Connor's short story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" challenge a reader’s notion of goodness?

Various characters in Flannery O’Connor’s short story “A
Good Man Is Hard to Find” challenge readers’ conventional notions of goodness in a
variety of ways, including the following:

• The
  grandmother thinks of herself as a good woman and tries to dress as one, but her notions
  of goodness are superficial until the very end of the story, when her final gesture
  toward the Misfit reveals to him, to her, and to us the nature of true
  goodness.


• The grandmother’s early notions of goodness are
  entangled with superficial notions of social and racial superiority, thus revealing her
  excessive pride (the root of all sin, from a Christian perspective). One of the most
  revealing (and ironic) moments in the story occurs when the grandmother laments the ways
  the present differs from the supposedly much better
  past:

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"In my time," said the grandmother, folding her
thin veined fingers, "children were more respectful of their native states and their
parents and everything else. People did right then. Oh look at the cute little
pickaninny!" she said and pointed to a Negro child standing in the door of a
shack.

In describing this
incident, O’Connor juxtaposes the grandmother’s pride in the morality of the past with
an unfortunate example of her own racism in the present. The grandmother, of course, is
not nearly as virulent a racist as she could have been, but her comment here is
sufficient evidence that she has too simple and shallow an understanding of
goodness.

• Red Sammy Butts is another character
  who complicates our sense of what true goodness is.  Like the grandmother, he thinks of
  himself as a good person and even shares this assessment with others.  He prides himself
  on being a veteran and on being generous to strangers, and thus it is not surprising
  that he and the grandmother see eye-to-eye on many issues, especially in their nostalgia
  about the past.  They also tend to blame anyone but themselves for the problems of the
  world, including the entire continent of Europe (!).


• Of
  course, the character who most obviously challenges our conventional notions of goodness
  is The Misfit.  He is the most polite, well-spoken, and (in some ways) considerate
  person in the tale, but he is also, of course, a killer himself and the head of a gang
  of killers.  By making The Misfit a good man is various superficial senses, O’Connor
  indicates that superficial goodness is insufficient.


• The
  truly “good man” in this story is (from O’Connor’s perspective) Jesus Christ, whose deep
  love of others led him to sacrifice himself so that they could be forgiven of their
  sins. By doing so, he threw “everything off balance,” as The Misfit puts it.  By
  demonstrating the possibility of utterly selfless love, Christ made it possible that
  even people like The Misfit can be redeemed and transformed (as the final paragraphs of
  the story hint may happen).


• The grandmother, in her final
  gesture of reaching out in compassion to a horrible sinner, becomes, by the very end of
  the story, herself a genuinely good person, if only for a split second.  She becomes the
  kind of truly “grand mother” that she could have been all along.  Ironically, it takes a
  confrontation with death and evil to help her achieve the true goodness of which she was
  always capable. Hints of this goodness had already appeared in her final atitudes toward
  Bailey, but not until she dies is her ultimate goodness especially
  obvious.