How does the setting function as more than mere backdrop in "A Good Man is Hard to Find"? How does the setting affect the story and the...

The setting of the murders is significant as well. Here the family goes off the main highway, down a dirt road which is "hilly and there were sudden washes in it and sharp curves on dangerous embankments.  All at once they would be on a hill . . .then the next minute,they would be in a red depression with the dust-coated trees looking down on them." They are looking for a house that the grandmother remembers, but after the accident she remembers it was in fact in a different state altogether. They are, in short, lost. The "dirt road" signifies the primitiveness of the surroundings; they are away from civilization where rules would otherwise apply. Here, with no rules, they meet the Misfit, a man who does not play by any rules. The "red depression with the dust-coated trees looking down on them" seems to suggest their smallness in the universe, in that nature cuts them down to size so that they can no longer think of themselves as people with control over their destiny. The grandmother dies in a ditch, with "her face smiling up at the cloudless sky," an ironic portrayal of her gruesome death, for in death she becomes innocent and childlike, and the "cloudless sky" suggests this.