119Thomas P . FlintREN 70.2 (Spring 2018)ON THE SI.docx

119
Thomas P . Flint
REN 70.2 (Spring 2018)
ON THE SIGNIFICANCE OF CIVIL WAR REFERENCES IN
FLANNERY O’CONNOR’S
“A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND”
Detail has to be controlled by some overall purpose, and every
detail has to be put to use for you.
Flannery O’Connor, “Writing Short Stories” (MM 93)
Much has been written about the ways in which the details
found in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find”
contribute to the overall themes of the story. The killings
that take place toward the end of the story, it has often been
noted,
are prefigured by many of the details presented earlier in the
work.
As Frederick Asals puts it, “there is a darkly menacing
undertone that
runs throughout the first part of the story in the form of
recurrent
references to violence and death” (147). What has not been
seen,
though, are the ways in which this undertone is augmented via
repeated
allusions, not to violence and death in general, but to the
specific locus

of evil that still haunted the South even during O’Connor’s
lifetime:
the Civil War. While the story surely is intended to have
broader ap-
plications, O’Connor, in accord with her usual practice and
consistent
advice, moves to the universal via the specific and the concrete:
it is
this family and these convicts, engaged in this journey through
a region
still traumatized by this war, that offer us a window into wider
truths.
While it would be specious to imply that the links drawn to the
Civil War offer the key to understanding O’Connor’s story,
recogniz-
ing their presence should have an impact upon one’s
appreciation of
the work. As I will argue below, they strengthen the case for
claiming
that one of the central morals of the story is the difficulty of our
dis-
cerning what justice requires. There are at least four references
to the
Civil War that occur in the story. Let us consider them, one by
one, in
the order in which they appear, before turning to the cumulative
effect
they have on the story as a whole.
The first clear reference to the War occurs when the
grandmother
points out Stone Mountain as one of the “interesting details of
the
scenery” (CS 119). Located a bit northeast of downtown
Atlanta,

Stone Mountain shouldn’t be readily visible to a family
travelling to
the southeast from the heart of the city.1 But history seems to
have
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RENASCENCE
120
become more prominent than geography in O’Connor’s mind.
For
Stone Mountain was, among other things, the location of a
planned
monumental carving of Robert E. Lee (flanked by Jefferson
Davis and
Stonewall Jackson), begun in 1915. Though still woefully
unfinished
(due to lack of funds) at the time O’Connor was writing, enough
of
the work had been done for Lee (astride his famous gray horse
Travel-
ler) to be visible. The mountain would thus serve to those
passing by as
a concrete reminder of the South’s most accomplished general.
The carving on Stone Mountain had been planned by the United
Daughters of the Confederacy, a group of women committed to
a
romanticized picture of the Confederacy and of the society it
endeavored
to perpetuate.2 As we soon see in the story, it is a picture

shared in
many ways by the grandmother, whom one can easily imagine
belong-
ing to the U.D.C. O’Connor repeatedly rejected interpretations
of her
story that presented the grandmother as an evil, witchlike
character,
but she undoubtedly saw her as comically misguided. And, as
Hallman
Bryant has suggested, the reference to Stone Mountain
contributes to
O’Connor’s delineation of her:
Flannery O’Connor was amused by the quixotic qualities of
the U.D.C., and Stone Mountain would evoke for Georgians of
O’Connor’s generation the folly of a sentimental project — a
project almost as futile as the grandmother’s in the story, whose
fascination with past grandeur is congruent with that of the
U.D.C.’s and has equally unfortunate results.
(Hallman 302,
fn. 3)
By calling our attention to the mountain, then, the grandmother
indi-
rectly reminds us of the lost cause which it attempted to
memorialize,
and begins to prepare us for the sorry events that her own
attachment
to a past that never was will engender.
The second Civil War reference is to “Gone with the Wind.”
Soon
after leaving Atlanta, the family encounters a small cemetery
contain-
ing only five or six graves.3 The grandmother reports that it
must have

been a family graveyard for a local plantation. When John
Wesley asks
where the plantation is now, the grandmother replies, “Gone
With the
Wind. . . . Ha. Ha” (CS 120).
Clearly struck with her own wit, the grandmother has managed
to remind us of the best-known novelistic and cinematic
depiction of
the War and of its aftermath in the South. While not, perhaps, as
dis-
torted as the memories of the Confederacy harbored by members
of
the U.D.C., Mitchell’s work and the film which it inspired were
seen
by many as doing more to perpetuate than to correct such
distortions.
121
FLINT
O’Connor was among the critics; she made no secret of her
negative
appraisals both of the novel and of the movie.4 Through the
grand-
mother’s reference, then, both the Civil War and the failure of
so many
Southerners to come to terms accurately with this seminal event
in
their past are subtly spotlighted.

Third comes a reference to General Sherman. After lunch at Red
Sammy’s (to which we’ll return shortly), the grandmother
recalls an-
other remnant of the antebellum South, a plantation she had
visited in
her youth. Struck by the desire to see it again, but realizing that
Bailey
will not easily agree to the detour involved, she gets the
children on her
side by a bit of deception:
“There was a secret panel in this house,” she said craftily, not
telling the truth but wishing that she were, “and the story went
that all the family silver was hidden in it when Sherman came
through but it was never found . . .” (CS 123)
The reference to Sherman reminds us of a fact which, though
men-
tioned neither in the story nor by its many commentators, is
striking
once noticed.5 The Misfit has escaped from the federal
penitentiary
(presumably in Atlanta, the only one in the area) and is heading
south-
east toward the sea and Florida. The family is travelling in
precisely the
same direction. And all are following the route of Sherman’s
famous
March to the Sea, from Atlanta to Savannah, O’Connor’s
childhood
home, via Milledgeville, the capital of Georgia during the War
and,
of course, O’Connor’s home for most of her adult life. Though
Sher-
man in 1864 saw his march — and the looting and destruction

that
accompanied it — as simply the fastest way to break further
South-
ern resistance and thus end the War, the reputation he and his
troops
earned for bringing “total war” to Georgia was and remains
mythic;
as John Marszalek has noted, “the march is remembered to this
day
as barbarism unleashed,” while Sherman himself “entered the
Con-
federate psyche and remains in some minds to the present
day.”6 For
those of us living in the twenty-first century, it’s easy to forget
that
O’Connor was writing at a time when survivors of Sherman’s
March
were still alive; she and most of her readers, at least most of her
South-
ern readers, had undoubtedly heard tales of the March from
actual
witnesses. O’Connor would surely have expected the mention of
Sher-
man’s name, then, to remind readers of “barbarism unleashed,”
and to
prepare us for the violence that eventually descends upon the
family.7
Finally, we have the significance of The Misfit’s two
companions.
The grandmother’s sudden recognition that the house she
remembers

RENASCENCE
122
was actually in Tennessee, not in Georgia, leads to the accident
which
presages the arrival of The Misfit and his two companions. The
descrip-
tion of his partners in crime is worthy of attention:
One was a fat boy in black trousers and a red sweat shirt with
a silver stallion embossed on the front of it. He moved around
on the right side of them and stood staring, his mouth partly
open in a kind of loose grin. The other had on khaki pants and
a blue striped coat and a gray hat pulled down very low, hiding
most of his face. (CS 126)
The boy in the red sweat shirt, we soon learn, is named Bobby
Lee,
while the one in the blue coat is Hiram.
The names might strike us as throwaways, as typical good-old-
boys monikers. Yet “Bobby Lee” is surely reminiscent of the
Robert E.
Lee whose depiction on Stone Mountain we have already
encountered.
And the silver stallion on Bobby Lee’s shirt seems to mirror
Lee’s horse
Traveller. So Bobby Lee brings to mind the South’s leading
military
leader from the War. But Lee is not alone. As was so often the
case
throughout the conflict of the 1860s, he’s accompanied by his
nemesis

from the North. For the name “Hiram” was not, it seems, chosen
ran-
domly; it was in fact the real first name of Lee’s counterpart on
the
Union side during the War, the general commonly known as
Ulysses S.
Grant.8 The Misfit, following Sherman’s trail of death and
destruction,
thus has his own Lee and Grant as companions.
The references to the Civil War are thus numerous throughout
the
story.9 But O’Connor, in keeping it would seem with the wider
points
she has in mind, expands the focus beyond one war. The family
with
whom we travel seems embroiled in a small-scale civil war from
the mo-
ment we meet them, and conflict remains the order of the day
virtually
until their end. Even the names of the constantly obnoxious
children
point, if only indirectly, toward larger conflicts in mid-
twentieth-century
America: “John Wesley” connotes the evangelical tradition still
domi-
nant in the South (if largely dormant in this family), while
“June Star”
perhaps suggests a growing American tension between the
profane,
glitzy world of Hollywood or Las Vegas and the Bible Belt.
Red Sam-
my Butts, proprietor of The Tower, is, as the signs along the
highway
proclaim, a veteran, and his very name recalls the two sides —
the

red Soviets vs. Uncle Sam — engaged in the Cold War still
raging at
the time of the story’s publication.10 Domestic contemporary
conflicts,
especially regarding the Civil Rights Movement, are also subtly
intro-
duced. The grandmother’s insensitive remarks concerning the
“cute
123
FLINT
little pickaninny” they pass on the road, and the poverty that no
doubt
afflicts his family, remind us that the repercussions of the Civil
War are
being heard still in the Georgia of the day.11 O’Connor would
no doubt
agree with Faulkner that the past “is never dead. It’s not even
past”
(Faulkner 73). Indeed, even the early reference to Stone
Mountain
brings back more than merely memories of the War, since, as
most (or
at least many) readers of the time would recall, Stone Mountain
was
the site where the reformulated Ku Klux Klan was reborn in
1915.12
So conflict, injustice, war, and violence are introduced

repeatedly
well before The Misfit and his crew commit the shocking acts of
murder
in which the story culminates. The Civil War is the central,
recurrent
image that leads us toward that ending, but the story is redolent
with
so many memories of evil that the conclusion seems all but
foreor-
dained. We march with Sherman, with Lee and with Grant, with
Cold
Warriors of both sides, with both sides of a culture war, with
victims
and with perpetrators of racial hatred, as we pass through
Toomsboro
toward death.
Given the Christian conviction that animates so much of
O’Connor’s work, it’s natural to suspect that these many
reminders of
conflict, and especially the many echoes of the Civil War, are
related
to a theological message. O’Connor stated that her early tales
were
“stories about original sin,” and she saw Southerners as
particularly
well-situated to appreciate such stories (HB 74). In “The
Regional
Writer,” O’Connor interprets Walker Percy’s explanation for the
abun-
dance of prominent twentieth-century Southern writers
(“Because we
lost the War”) in a theological way:
What he was saying was that we have had our Fall. We have
gone into the modern world with an inburnt knowledge of

human limitations and with a sense of mystery. . . . Not every
lost war would have this effect on every society, but we were
doubly blessed, not only in our Fall, but in having a means to
interpret it. Behind our own history, deepening at every point,
has been another history. Mencken called the South the Bible
Belt, in scorn and thus in incredible innocence. (MM 59)
How does “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” with its numerous
allusions
to the lost War, relate to the Christian story of the Fall? This is
too
broad an issue to discuss fully here. It does seem, though, that
one ele-
ment of O’Connor’s story both connects to the Christian
concept of
original sin and is illuminated by the ties in the story to the
Civil War.
The notion of original sin suggests that all of us enter life with
an
inherited stain that predisposes us to dreadful acts, acts that cry
out for
RENASCENCE
124
retribution. But how much culpability do we bear for what we
do? And
how much punishment do we deserve for such acts? These are
questions
that have bedeviled Christians for centuries. And in O’Connor’s

story,
it is precisely such questions, applied to his own life, that most
trouble
The Misfit.
The Misfit never proclaims himself to be innocent, but he does
see
his punishment as out of proportion to his crimes, whatever
exactly
they were. (He says that he doesn’t know for what he is
supposed to
be doing penance in prison — which, tellingly, is always
referred to
in the story as a penitentiary, never as a prison or a jail.) The
sense
of being unjustly “buried alive” (CS 130) in prison is one he
carries
with him still; the gray, cloudless, sunless sky, noted first by
The Misfit
(CS 127), resembles the drab, tomblike prison cell he
inhabited.13 That
featureless sky, of course, imprisons the family as well, and (as
Asals
has noted) the death sentences given them by The Misfit seem
as exces-
sive a punishment as was his own, despite the faults the
grandmother
and her progeny have so patently displayed (Asals 151). And
this sense
of paying too high a price for one’s sins once again connects us
to
the War. From the perspective of many in the South, the
retribution
imposed upon them, by Sherman and by so many others in the
wake
of their defeat, seemed wildly out of balance; their sins, genuine

and
serious as they were, deserved treatment less vindictive than
what the
North dispensed.
Or so it seemed to them. Prisons, the saying goes, are full of
innocent people – innocent in their own minds, at least. Even
those of
us willing to acknowledge our guilt are usually poor judges of
what
punishment we deserve for our misdeeds. As we have noted,
The Misfit
is not unaware of his own failings — “Nome, I ain’t a good
man” he
at last replies to the grandmother’s repeated ascriptions of
goodness
to him (CS 128) — yet he feels confident that his punishment
has been
extreme. His very name, given to him by himself, testifies to
this con-
viction: “‘I call myself The Misfit,’ he said, ‘because I can’t
make what
all I done wrong fit what all I gone through in punishment’”
(CS 131).
The grandmother no doubt can, to some extent, sympathize with
this
feeling; surely she feels that the disrespect repeatedly shown
her by her
own family is out of all proportion to whatever peccadillos she
might
have committed.
It is, perhaps, relevant to remind ourselves that the accident,
and the subsequent deaths, are due to the presence in the car of
yet
another captive who surely feels mistreated — the family cat,

Pitty
Sing. The cat’s name is a slightly disguised reference to Pitti-
Sing,
one of the “three little maids” in Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta
The
125
FLINT
Mikado. Like the characters in O’Connor’s story, Pitti-Sing
faces a
punishment that seems excessive; unlike them, one might think,
she
is fortunate enough to live in a fictional world governed by a
ruler
who sees to it that “the punishment fits the crime” — no more,
and
no less. The Misfit is convinced he lives in no such world, and
while it
would be wrong to see him as compassionate only toward
himself, the
pity that he expresses and the sense of injustice he feels are
primarily
self-directed. In this respect too, his attitude largely parallels
that of
the grandmother, whose words (until the very end of the story)
seem
constantly designed primarily to secure her own survival.
Her failure at achieving this goal is overshadowed, though, by

the
sudden insight that she receives immediately before her death.
Despairing,
one might think, of moving The Misfit by the appeals to
breeding, to
morality, and to religion that have dominated her remarks, the
grand-
mother, “not knowing what she was saying” (CS 132), suggests
to
The Misfit that perhaps Jesus didn’t in fact raise the dead. The
Misfit
concedes that he has no way of knowing, since he wasn’t there,
but
insists that his position of uncertainty is another example of
unjust
punishment — punishment because it leaves him with no way of
tell-
ing how he should lead his life (follow Jesus or pursue pleasure
via
meanness to others), and unjust (“It ain’t right”) because he did
nothing to
deserve his condition of incurable ignorance. As he beats the
ground
with his fist and bewails his situation “in a high voice,” the
grandmother,
who had dizzily sunk to the ground just moments before,
undergoes a
stunning transformation:
the grandmother’s head cleared for an instant. She saw the
man’s face twisted close to her own as if he were going to cry
and she murmured, “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one
of my own children!” She reached out and touched him on the
shoulder. (CS 132)
Sympathy for self has, at least momentarily, been replaced by

sympathy
for another, for one whom she recognizes as being more like her
— so
much like her as to be her own child — than she had ever before
seen.
Self-pity and the concern that she is being treated unjustly
evaporate in
her compassion for the suffering of another.
And so she dies, shot three times by The Misfit. After the
shooting, “he
put his gun down on the ground and took off his glasses and
began
to clean them” (CS 132). The cleaning of the glasses suggests
that The
Misfit feels he’s not seeing things as he ought — and perhaps
suggests
that clean lenses will allow him to see more clearly. And what
he sees
RENASCENCE
126
about the grandmother is nicely encapsulated in his claim to
Bobby
Lee, “She would of been a good woman . . . if it had been
somebody
there to shoot her every minute of her life” (CS 133).
Much has been written on the The Misfit’s concluding appraisal

of the grandmother, and surely no one reading of the line is
sufficient
to capture its full meaning. But given the emphasis in his own
story,
and in the latter half of O’Connor’s story, on the notions of sin
and
punishment, it is plausible to connect his words with those
notions. It
does seem that only the extraordinarily painful circumstances in
which
she was placed allowed the grandmother to escape the narrow
focus on
self that animated her prior behavior. Was her suffering an
instance of
just punishment? From one perspective, perhaps not. But
“extreme” or
“excessive” punishment may sometimes be the only way to
awaken a
person to the shallow nature of his or her life. Is a lesser, more
“just” or
“fitting,” punishment preferable — is it really more fitting — if
it leaves
one blind to one’s actual condition? Maybe some people do
need to be
shot every minute (so to speak) to see what they really are.
From a Christian perspective, attempts to form judgments as to
what degree of suffering one requires, or as to whether one’s
punishments
are excessive or unjust, may best be seen as further
manifestations of
the pride and arrogance that precipitated our original Fall.
These are
judgments we are in no position to make; they are best left to
God.
One can hope this is a message The Misfit is beginning to take

to heart
at the end of the story, though honesty compels us to confess
that we
have evidence for nothing more than hope. And it is a message,
one
might think, that Southerners in general, tempted to shake their
fists
in God’s face in the wake of their wartime sufferings, were
especially
well primed to appreciate. Perhaps nothing less than suffering
on such
a scale would have led at least the more discerning Southerners
to face
the reality of slavery and of its continuing ramifications.
Seen in this light, then, the references to the Civil War serve to
reinforce one of the central themes of the story. In “The
Catholic
Novelist in the Protestant South,” O’Connor famously claimed
that
“evil is not simply a problem to be solved but a mystery to be
endured”
(MM 209). And part of the mystery, for O’Connor at least, is
the
question of what constitutes just punishment. To endure the
mystery
of evil means, among other things, to acknowledge that the
fittingness
of the evils we encounter is for God to judge, not for us.14
127

FLINT
NOTES
1 See Bryant 302, fn. 3. It probably is a bit presumptuous to
suggest, as Bryant
does, that O’Connor was unaware of the precise location of the
mountain, especially
given our ignorance of the exact starting point of the family;
had they started from
the northeast suburbs, they could easily have passed close to
Stone Mountain. In any
event, O’Connor might readily have assumed that questions
concerning the probable
proximity of the mountain to the family’s path would not occur
to (or at least not
trouble) many readers.
2 For one description of the group and of the project, see Neal
23-33.
3 As Alex Link notes, the gravestones at the plantation mirror
the virtual
gravestone for the Confederacy that Stone Mountain has
become. See Link 132.
4 See Gooch 68.
5 Even readers of the story who are quite perceptive to its
intricacies have
failed to remark on the specific relevance of the Sherman
reference. For example,
Asals claims that the grandmother, through her actions and
words, “reveals the fam-
ily’s trip as mere empty movement through space” (145). As we

will see, the specific
space through which the family moves is related to the thrust of
the story.
6 Marszalek. For detailed descriptions of the effects of the
March, see also
Bryan 166-73. It’s interesting to note that O’Connor owned a
copy of Bryan’s book,
inscribed to her by the author; see Getz 89. Bryan’s book was
published early in
the same year that “A Good Man is Hard to Find” was written,
but whether or not
O’Connor consulted it prior to finishing the story is impossible
to know. See, though,
Bryan’s description of a Confederate hiding his gold from the
approaching Union
forces (a story parallel in some ways to the “secret panel” tale
concocted by the grand-
mother) on 168.
7 That we have three parallel journeys — of Sherman and his
army, of The
Misfit and his gang, and of the grandmother and her family — is
not surprising in a
story in which triads so frequently appear. The Misfit escaped
the penitentiary with
two confederates; the grandmother’s family includes three
adults and three children.
The family is planning on a three-day trip to Florida, as we
know because of Pitty
Sing’s presence; the grandmother secretly brought the cat along
because she felt he
shouldn’t be “left alone in the house for three days” (CS 118).
The children insist
three times that they want to see “the house with the secret
panel”; Bailey finally gives

in – on the condition, stated three times, that they all “shut up”
(CS 123). After their
mishap, the children scream three times, “We’ve had an
ACCIDENT” (CS 125-26).
The grandmother tells The Misfit three times “you’re a good
man” (CS 127-28), calls
for “Bailey Boy” on three occasions (CS 128, 129, and 132),
and insists three times (CS
127 and 132) that The Misfit (who three times scratches in the
ground (CS 127-29))
wouldn’t shoot a lady. And the shootings occur in three
groupings (first the males, then
the three younger females, then the grandmother), with the
grandmother shot “three
times through the chest” (CS 132) as the story reaches its
climax.
8 The confusion regarding Grant’s name began with his career
at West Point:
the congressman who appointed Grant incorrectly wrote the
name as “Ulysses S.
Grant,” and Hiram Ulysses decided not to rectify matters. See
McFeely 12.
9 Whether such references would have been included had the
story been written
RENASCENCE
128

later in her career could be debated. Already in January of 1961
— when Civil War
centennial events were but beginning — O’Connor told a
correspondent, “I sure am
sick of the Civil War” (HB 426).
10 O’Connor may well have fashioned his name with more than
serious motives
in mind. After all, we enter and leave Red Butts’s establishment
to the chattering of
Sammy’s pet monkey. And monkeys are known for colorful,
often red, posteriors.
11 O’Connor seems to have been well aware of just how
offensive the grand-
mother’s “pickaninny” comments were. In her letter to “A” on
January 31, 1959, she
reported that she intended to leave out this paragraph in a public
reading of the story
in Chicago. “I can write with ease,” she confesses, “what I
forebear to read” (HB 377).
12 The link between Stone Mountain and the Klan has been
noted previously by
commentators, but few of them have ascribed much significance
to it. See, for example,
Link 127-28.
13 “‘Turn to the right, it was a wall,’ The Misfit said, looking
up again at the
cloudless sky. ‘Turn to the left, it was a wall. Look up it was a
ceiling, look down it was
a floor’” (CS 130).
14 I would like to thank JoAnn DellaNeva for comments on an
earlier draft of

this essay.
WORKS CITED
Asals, Frederick. Flannery O’Connor: The Imagination of
Extremity. Athens, GA:
University of Georgia P, 1982.
Bryan, T. Conn. Confederate Georgia. Athens, GA: University
of Georgia P, 1953.
Bryant, Hallman. “Reading the Map in ‘A Good Man is Hard to
Find’.” Studies in
Short Fiction 18 (1981): 301-07.
Faulkner, William. Requiem for a Nun. New York: Vintage
Books, 2011 [1950].
Getz, Lorine. Flannery O’Connor: Her Life, Library and Book
Reviews. New York:
Edwin Mellen P, 1980.
Gooch, Brad. Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor. New
York: Little, Brown and
Company, 2009.
Link, Alex. “Means, Meaning, and Mediated Space in ‘A Good
Man Is Hard to
Find’.” Southern Quarterly 44 (2007): 125-38.
Marszalek, John. “Scorched Earth: Sherman’s March to the
Sea.” Hallowed Ground 15
(2014). Accessed at http://www.civilwar.org/hallowed-ground-
magazine/fall-2014/
scorched-earth.html.
McFeely, William S. Grant: A Biography . New York: Norton,

1981.
Neal, Willard. The Story of Stone Mountain. Atlanta: Neal and
Rogers, 1963.
O’Connor, Flannery. …
Insert here your Last Name First Name
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Remember, failure to cite sources constitutes an academic
integrity violation.
· For Parts I and II, when you are providing justification, as I
mentioned above, reference is required. If you are giving
reference of a book, I will need page number(s). I cannot go

through the complete book to verify your reference.
· Your answers should be contained in a Microsoft Word (or
compatible format that can be opened by MSWord) document,
uploaded to your assignments folder. If you use some other
word processor, please make sure that the numbering does not
change. I mayreturn files (ungraded) in any other format if I
cannot open them in one try. I may also check your part III
answers with Turnitin.
· Please submit questions regarding the exam to your instructor
at [email protected]. Since I can check the emails on my smart
phone, I check email a lot more often than “questions to
instructor” section in LEO. If questions submitted are generic, I
will post them in the discussion area or as a new news item.
· Please be sure to put your name in the header on every page
including page #’s.
· You will be getting an absolute grade out of 100 for this test.
However, the final course grade will depend on the relative
performance of the class.
· Name your file “Last name First name INFA640 Midterm”.
Replace “Last name” with your last name and so on. Naming
files as instructed will help me to save time. I have encountered
files without your name which I may return ungraded.
_____________________________________________________
_________________________Part II (6 points each, Total 30)
Q1a Complete the following Truth Table: F denotes false and
T denotes true
A
B
C=A or B
D= A xor B
E= A and B
F
F

F
T
T
T
T
F
Q1b In the following Θ denotes one of the following operators:
’or’, ‘xor’ or ‘and’.
Input1 Θ input2 = Result
where, input1 and, Inpuut2 are ‘A’ and ‘B’ and Results are C,
D, or E from the above table.
Which operation will yield? (what is Θ?)
input1 Θ result = input 2
input2 Θ result = input 1
Please show proof for one, or disprove other two
Hint:
Check
Input1 OR result = Input2?
Input2 OR result = Input1? For results C, D and E, and inputs
A and B
Repeat replacing OR with AND, and XOR
As soon as the given operator is not valid for an operation go to
the next operator.
Please show proof. Without proof you will get partial credit
only

Q2 Using the English alphabet (i.e., mod 26 arithmetic) let
plaintext = {p1, p2, pn,} and corresponding cipher text = {c1,
c2, cn}.
{start A as 1, B as 2 and so on}
Suppose the encryption function is ci = pi + 8 (mod 26).
You receive the cipher text message CUCKQAVWECUOK
What type of cipher is this?
What is the decryption function, and the decrypted/recovered
plaintext, (insert spaces to make readable)?
Show all your steps.
Q3 You are Alice. You have agreed with your friend Bob that
you will use the Diffie-Hellman public-key algorithm to
exchange secret keys. You and Bob have agreed to use the
public base g = 7 and public modulus p = 941.
You have secretly picked the value SA = 17 You begin the
session by sending Bob your calculated value of TA. Bob
responds by sending you the value TB = 268.
What is the value of TA
What is the value of your shared secret key?
Can you guess Bob’s secret value SB and what it would be?
Show each and every step of your calculations, if you use Excel
for mod calculation include the spreadsheet, for any other
method include the screenshot of that method
[without the spreadsheet or screenshot, you will not get the full
credit]
for mod calculation, the following identity may be useful
mod(X*Y,p) = mod[mod(X,p)*mod(Y,p),p]
mod ( X^n, p) = mod [mod(X^k, p)*mod(X^m, p), p]; where
k+m=n
e.g. mod (X^17, 941) = mod [mod (X^8, 941) *mod (X^9, 941),
941]; where 8+9=17
Q4 Bob believes that he has come up with a nifty hash

function. He assigns a numeric value VChar to each letter in the
alphabet equal to the letter’s position in the alphabet, i.e., VA =
1, VB = 2, …, VZ = 26. For a message, he calculates the hash
value H = (VChar 1 x VChar 2 x VChar 3 …x VChar N) mod
(26).
Bob uses this function to send a one-word message, “FATHER”
to his supervisor Bill, along with his calculated hash value for
the message. Alice is able to intercept the message and
generates an alternative message that has a hash value that
collides with Bob’s original hash value.
Give definition and properties of the hash function.
Show a message that Alice may have used to spoof Bob’s
message and demonstrate that its hash value collides with Bob’s
original hash.
Q5 Consider the following plaintext message: IT IS
EXCITING TO KNOW THAT WE MAY HAVE FOUND A
PLANET SIMILAR TO EARTH MATTER IN THE UNIVERSE.
0. (3 pts) If this message is sent unencrypted and successfully
received, what is its entropy? And why?
0. (3 pts) If this message is encrypted with DES using a random
56-bit key, what is the encrypted message’s entropy? And why
_____________________________________________________
_________________________
Part III
Essay Question: Length: 800- 900 words. Use APA format for
in-line citations and references. (30 pts.)
Compare and contrast symmetric and asymmetric encryption
algorithms.
· Your response should include a brief overview of the
cryptographic basis for each type of algorithm, and a
comparison of their strengths and vulnerabilities. [20 pts]
· Describe how a hacker might go about cracking a message
encrypted with each type of algorithm. [6 pts]

· Suggest a specific application for each type of algorithm
(symmetric and asymmetric) where the advantages clearly
outweigh the disadvantages. [4 pts]
· Remember to address all points

119Thomas P . FlintREN 70.2 (Spring 2018)ON THE SI.docx

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119Thomas P . FlintREN 70.2 (Spring 2018)ON THE SI.docx