The Misfit has the entire family killed until the grandmother is the only one still alive. During the entire story, the grandmother refers to herself as a lady. It’s not until The Misfit is about to kill her that she has a revelation that she may not be all that she has thought . The Misfit himself notices this when he exclaims “She would have been a good woman,” (Flannery 261) and “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life” (Flannery 261). Judith Wynne thinks that “O’Connor’s irony can be seen as sacramental, not because it works with the stuff of religious belief and non-belief, which it does, but because it itself operates as a vehicle of revelation (Wynne).
The narrator expresses how the grandmother thinks The Misfit will recognize and respect her moral code furthermore respecting her life. She is a women that judges people all throughout the story based on their physical appearance and outward behavior. Even when she meets The Misfit
It is apparent that the grandmother practices older traditions when compared to the other members of her family,
This notion of redemption is primarily seen with the Misfit and his character development away from the pleasure of a murderer. Had it not been for the collision of the Grandmother and his paths, redemption would have been unlikely, even unachievable, for him. O’Connor intended for this story to have a positive ending, despite the death toll that is present at the end of the story. With her Catholic beliefs, the small act of the Grandmother’s compassion and the Misfit’s questioning of his morals are rather impactful to each of their redemptions. Perhaps O’Connor’s religious views could be insightful to religious scholars on the question of whether human nature is
The Misfit is portrayed to the grandmother as an erratic criminal a loose and seeking new victims. The grandmother‘s initial instinct is to fear this individual and she even claims, “I wouldn’t take my children in any direction with a criminal a loose in it” (1285). She assumes his morals are corrupt and presumably labels him as a predator. Later in the story, we quickly see an allusive shift in the grandmother’s beliefs at the arrival of The Misfit. The importance of their conversation is centralized around the religious factor that allows readers to confer The Misfit is not as we expect.
The reality between the Misfit and the Grandmother are very different and from this viewpoint it seems as if the Grandmother is a more dishonest and unfaithful person when it comes to selfishness. The Misfit does not express selfishness, rather he equally treats himself as he would with the people that he murdered. With two distinct differences in reality, both show similar signs of
This conversation in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” between The Misfit, an infamous criminal in Georgia, and his accomplice Bobby Lee reveals the senseless views of not only The Misfit, but also the grandmother he just murdered. Both characters appear to be different, yet they feel authorized at some point in the story to assert their irrational judgments. Towards the end of her life the grandmother finally shows empathy depicting her as the lesser of two evils. While The Misfit acknowledges the grandmother’s moment of goodness, his cynical thinking ultimately leads him to seemingly rationalize his murders when he implies that his barbaric actions are meaningless.
Now she throws this term out there in an attempt to save her own life which it does not. The grandmother is very narcissistic. When she is shot the Misfit says “She would have been a good woman, if it had been some-body there to shoot her every minute of her life.” (O’Connor,
The misfit gains awareness of human morals when he kills the grandmother and he says, "She would have been a good woman...if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life" (O 'Connor 1020), he then realized that she wasn 't all that good. O 'Connor did a good job of interpreting the grandmother as a way to put away the values of the old Southern America; she also interprets the Misfit as a type of common man who is defiantly not perfect which can a realistic version of the new Southern America. In "A Good Man is Hard to Find", the irritating grandmother cares more about matters such as her appearance and manners, she dressed her best for the car ride and the reason for her doing this is so that "In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would at once know that she was a lady." (O 'Connor 1010). The grandmother is a very selfish woman, the first thing she said to the Misfit is "You wouldn 't shoot a lady, would you?"
A personal perspective of the Misfits morals are not ‘good’ but highly impacted based from this actions that were done within his past that spaced the morals he lives by now. At the end of the story, we see is that he is faced with change of heart when it came to being in the woods with the older lady, whose own
Viewing The Misfit as a tragic figure, we sympathize with his actions and feel remorse for who he has become. The readers see him as a victim and sympathize for his actions, including killing the elderly Grandmother. Although he is an awful person, because he is a male character, it is acceptable for him to have issues, but it is not acceptable for a woman to have any sort of issue. As the Misfits says, “She would have been a good woman...if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life” (O’Connor), this suggests that the Grandmother was an awfully annoying woman, but if she had a man there to keep her in line, she would have been a decent
(6:27). O 'Connor presents both the view of the Misfit as a fellow human being in pain, and the feeling of love for him, as a gift from God. The grandmother as a human being, is prone towards evil and selfishness, so she could never have come to feel such love without God 's help, as this man was going to kill her. This moment of grace is incredibly important in the story. The Misfit kills the grandmother, withdrawing from her and what seems foreign to him (human compassion), but the grandmother already had her moment of redemption.
Moreover, when the Misfit and the two men shoot the whole family in the woods, it illustrates the sinister and cruel world that needs saving. The violent car crash that causes the family to encounter the Misfit in the first place adds to the violent display that O’Connor creates of the world. O’Connor uses the violence in the story to shock the readers into self-awareness (Larson 1). She uses this self-awareness to bring to light the religious theme of redemption and grace for the corrupted. O’Connor’s
The Misfit was a purely evil character while the Grandmother had good intentions. Color symbolism was used throughout the story to give an insight of what is going to happen eventually. The animals also played a large portion of the symbolism attached to… The Misfit along with Hiram and Bobby Lee were all purely evil characters that killed everyone in his way.
The Misfit 's mind is one of the most complicated of any villain in O 'Connor’s stories and in all literature. His mental state is most evident in "the scene between the Grandmother and the Misfit at the climax of the story" (Walls 3) This recent escapee 's psyche can be described as "tails short of the athlete’s morality, for he plays by no one 's rules except his own" (Fike). This mental state is typical of most criminals but the Misfit’s perception on religion is not so conventional. Usually, when a person commits a heinous act and if the person is spiritual they will say God told them to do it.
