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The relationship between good and evil
The relationship between good and evil
The relationship between good and evil
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Before the Edicts, the Jesuits had made incredible progress. By 1582, Japan had about 250 Churches, over 200,000 converts and the numbers continued to grow. In 1610 the Catholic Church had about 300,000 Japanese converts and followers. (24) However, after Hideyoshi’s order to end all christian influence, the Japanese converts quickly began to disappear.
There is something which occurred in his childhood that triggered the Misfit to want to commit these violence. The Misfits name plays a significant role in the story. This character feels out of place in the world and different from everyone else. There is an innocent gesture in the story the Misfit claims the reason for his name is because he can’t make what all he has done wrong fit the
The Misfit knows who he is and does not pretend to be otherwise, unlike the old lady. With a show of unpretentiousness, he clearly states, “Nome, I ain’t a good man” (O’Connor 427). In the end, the antagonist enlightens the Grandmother with his brutal honesty, and her “head cleared for an instance” (O’Connor 430). In the final moments of her life, she is able to drop all pretenses and view evil in the form of the Misfit as something she can accept within herself by exclaiming, “Why you’re one of my babies” (O’Connor 430). Ironically, at the moment she reaches out to him, he kills her.
The old woman mumbled, “Maybe he didn’t raise the dead.” He said with sorrow, “I wasn’t there, so I can’t say he didn’t.” As his fist hit the ground, he said,” I wisht I had been there.” He continued, “It ain’t right
O’Connor uses more symbolism throughout the short story, some are easier to find then others but they all represent something very important. The author created The Misfit as a character who was out and about killing people just because he wanted to. With that being said, The Misfit drives a car to the scene where the family is stranded, and the car is symbolic. The car he drives is symbolic because “A few minutes after the accident with all of the shaken adults huddled in the ditch, the family notices a hearse-like automobile approaching slowly from the top of the hill” (Bloom). This is symbolic in the fact that the color black symbolizes death, evil, and power in which all of those make sense.
The character of the Misfit is talked about multiple times in the story before the Misfit actually appears. The grandmother reads from the local paper that the criminal, the Misfit, is loose from federal prison (O’ Connor). I find this ironic because the grandmother and her family are found by the Misfit after they put their car in the ditch. The Misfit says to the grandmother, “I ain’t a good man, but I ain’t the worst in the world neither. I been in the arm service, both land and sea, and been twict married.”
The Misfit goes into a speech about Jesus, “Jesus thrown everything off balance. It was the same case with Him as with me except He hadn’t committed any crime and they could prove I had committed one because they had the papers on me,” (151). He stated that he was the kind of child who had to know everything and not knowing if Jesus did what people have said He had done has made him the way he is. The Misfit’s need to know everything and him not being able to confirm or reject Jesus’s story has formed a stubborn predicament that takes over him (Woodiwiss).
In another quote the grandmother implies that the misfit is a good man by stating, "Yes it's a beautiful day," said the grandmother. "Listen, " she said, "You shouldn't call yourself the misfit because I know you're a good man at heart. I can just look at you and tell" (421). The grandmother doesn't know the misfit from Adam, yet she already gave him a persona that he has to match. Besides the grandmother has already called Red Sammy a good man, and by now it is already apparent that its feigned.
The first sentence, “The grandmother didn’t want to go to florida,” (Lawrence 406) gives the reader a glimpse into who the grandmother is as a person. She is depicted as a selfish and manipulative person. In the beginning of the story she was always trying to change her son Bailey’s mind to get the family to go to Tennessee instead of Florida. “The children have been to Florida before, you all ought to take them somewhere else for a change…” (Lawrence 406).
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
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 story opens with a man named Bailey who is going on a trip with his family to Florida. However, his mother had other plans and becomes the "manipulative grandmother lecturing her apathetic son" (Sparrow). At first she tries to convince her son to change the trip destination saying ""(O 'Connor). It might be inferred that she meant well by warning Bailey about the prison escapee traveling in the same direction. Unfortunately, later in the story the reader finds out that .
The Misfit is seen as being a part of reality and only believing what he sees with physical evidence. He also stays true to his morals of what he believes is right and wrong, especially when it comes to showing the equality of no mercy among the family members. Both characters reveal their use of Jesus, the spiritual battle that inhibits them and their concepts of reality. All of this gives insight to how there are no good or bad characters at the finale of this story. The battle of morality between the two characters only shows the
(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.
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?"
