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Analysis Of Mark Twain's 'The Misfit'

781 Words4 Pages

1. The grandmother represents the conventional social values such as that she considers herself a lady. For instance, she is dressed very elegantly for a road trip as mentioned on page 965, “In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady.” She believes children should be respectful of their native states and parents. The religious values represented by her are that prayers and Jesus would help the sinner. These values are exposed in the course of the story in various situations. For example, the grandmother persuades her son not to go to Florida, and she feels that children should listen to their parents. She tries to convince the Misfit to pray so that he feels better. The Misfit means …show more content…

The philosophic position the Misfit unknowingly gives voice to in rationalizing his actions is that he is a victim of the circumstances happened to him. As mentioned on page 972, the Misfit says, “I never was a bad boy that I remember of.” The Misfit believes he was innocent and still had to serve time in a penitentiary. The atmosphere of the penitentiary was so traumatic that he lost his innocence and turned into a criminal. When the Misfit says that Jesus has thown everything off balance. He means that Jesus forgives the sinner thus the sinner does not feel guilty. Perhaps that is the case with misfit where he knows that he is guilty of his crimes but at the same time he thinks he is innocent. At the other instance where the Misfit uses the same statement, he means that if Jesus was the only one who raised the dead and this disrupts the balance. The Misfit’s view of reality is more honest because he accepts he is not a good man. On the other hand, the grandmother lives in past and refuses to accept the changes. The grandmother gives importance to the appearances whereas the misfit does not care about the appearance. Moreover, when the grandmother was at gunpoint, she tends to call an escaped convict a good man when she knows he is a dangerous

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