What is the central conflict? Is it internal or external?

In Flannery O' Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," there are many different conflicts at play—the family is at odds with one another, the Misfit is a clear external threat to all the characters, and the grandmother experiences dilemmas with her own understanding in several instances in the book. While the external conflicts create the events of the plot, it is ultimately the internal conflict that is most central to the theme, as the grandmother's realization of her own corrupt nature is the essential climactic moment.The external conflicts set up the grandmother's character as she sits in judgement of the other characters. She is critical of her son and of her grandchildren for being unfeeling and uncivilized; however, she doesn't realize her own hypocrisy until she is faced with the truly unfeeling and uncivilized Misfit.
The internal conflict comes to a head whenever the grandmother is alone with the Misfit toward the end of the story. The Misfit admits to her that he is how he is because he doesn't know for sure about the nature of Jesus Christ, saying,




"Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead . . . and He shouldn't have done it. He thrown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it's nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him, and if He didn't, then it's nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can—by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness."




With this, the grandmother begins to recognize that her brand of Christianity and her critical nature were complicit in creating a world in which a man like the Misfit would come to be. He felt unable to be good, unable to be enough, and since he couldn't be sure that it was worth trying to be good, he turned to evil. The grandmother verbalizes her realization in the emphatic line

The grandmother's head cleared for an instant. . . . And she murmured, "Why you're one of my babies. You're one of my own children!"

And with this, the Misfit shoots her, claiming, "She would of been a good woman . . . if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."
This line reveals that the woman's ability to finally equate herself with her fellow man is the real theme of the narrative, which in turn reveals the main conflict to be internal rather than external.