Misfit Response To The Grandmother's

I believe The Misfit took his religion serious but he was confused. The grandmother never took her religious faith seriously. Her final gesture is a genuine moment of grace. Once again she is trying to be manipulative, but The Misfit is one who she cannot manipulate, or is she?

Another virtue the grandmother lacks is courage. Courage is “The state or quality of mind or spirit that enables one to face danger with self-possession, confidence and resolution” (Courage). When The Misfit arrives, the grandmother is nothing but a coward. She exhibits no self-possession, “Alone with The Misfit, the grandmother found that she had lost her voice” (O’ Connor 1116), displayed here when she can’t even speak. She also has no resolution to the situation but to give The Misfit her money, “‘I’ll give you all the money I’ve got!’” (O’ Connor

Why The Misfit Killed The Grandmother In O’Conner’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”

The timing for the presence of a make-believe house that never existed in the town of Georgia determined the destiny of a family of five. The protagonist and the protagonist are center for the actions of good and evil. Whether good or evil is used for a beneficial or evil ways, they both go hand in hand. In accordance to the grandmother, she used the form of good to manipulate a criminal into think that he had good left in him deep down. She also used the sense of goodness in her desperate time of need for survival when she was standing in her grave face to face with the Misfit. On the other hand, the Misfit commits such violent acts to survive and had the necessary necessities to prolong his life. He only acts in violence because it brings good to him a way. The Misfit who has no one and no family and las lost all sanity does what he has to do to be alive. The story has a foundation of family, the influence of manipulation, and good vs. evil. Which are the characteristics and the personality of the protagonist and the antagonist. In a way, the main characters play the role of god. The grandmother plays the role of a judge on who is “good” and who is “evil” she considers herself a good Christian and the Misfit is just Evil in his actions. The Misfit plays the role of god by taking innocent lives and thinking it is okay because he says the punishment and crime never match with the person committing it. He was punished for the killing of his father, which he did not commit. Humanity is destined to be flawed and is capable of both actions. Even though good is always within reach, so is evil at the same time. Both main characters were stripped with what they valued the most and were left alone with nothing. The Misfit was a social outcast on the run from the system and the Grandmother was left alone in a devastating state

In the conversation between the grandmother and the Misfit, the Misfit talks of his past and how he was arrested for killing his father, which he denies committing. He claims that no one believed that he did not kill his father because there were papers that claimed that he did. This results

Unlike the Grandmother, the Misfit truly questions the importance of his life and his part within it. When the Grandmother begins to plead for her life in a religious sense, the Misfit shares his thoughts on Jesus and religion. He states that “Jesus thrown everything off balance,” (O’Connor, 195) then goes on to actually compare himself to Jesus. “He hadn’t committed any crime and they could prove I had committed on because they had the papers on me.” (O’Connor, 195) Here, the Misfit victimizes himself. He believes he has been obligated to suffer for a crime he has committed, yet does not fully understand the reason why. Although he does not necessarily admit that he committed the crime, it comes off as though he knows he did something

He acts like a mirror. He lets whatever the Grandmother says bounce right off him. He never really agrees with her or disagrees, and in the end he is the one who kills her. His second to last line, “She would of been a good woman,” The Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life,”(O'Conner 425). might be the way O'Conner felt about most of us alive, or how she felt that God must feel about us. The third, and final stage of the Grandmother is the moment of recovery. She finally sees The Misfit for who he really is, a person just like her. He is not someone who was made by his social class. He is a simple human being just like her. At this point she sees herself in relation to everyone else. She finally realizes that her class does not make her. Society makes the class, and she just fits into it. She shows this by claiming that The Misfit could be one of her own beloved children.

Flannery O 'Connor 's stories “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”, and “Good Country People” both present very similar themes. Within these stories is the theme of redemption, and the way relationships affect the way people interact with each other seem to be a core issue she struggles with. Both stories have a protagonist that have to deal with some type of villain who has little to no belief, while their presence of faith that there is good in people gets them into the horrible situations that they find themselves in. She uses some of the same aspects in both stories in very different ways. The characters are a big part of her stories, the conflicts that arise in the story, and the symbolism that is used. This paper will explore how faith can lead us to have false hope and why it is important to remain aware.

The grandmother feels that God provides the answer to any underlying problems, and the Misfit knows and feels that all of the horrible things he has done are truly not considered morally wrong from his perspective. Towards the end, when the grandmother experienced an epiphany before the Misfit shot her in the chest she stated, “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children” (11). This made the grandmother realize that she was expressing the true Christian belief that we are all seen as equal in the eyes of God, no matter how murderous someone may be. O’Connor’s use of spiritual insight stripped away the grandmothers self-centeredness, and helped her discover the ability to see others with compassion and understanding. Nonetheless, within “A Good Man is Hard to Find” O’Connor provides great amount of spiritual insight in her short stories mainly as a way to connect her characters with God and to make them recognize the true meaning of individual equality.

With the shock of coming face-to-face with death, she starts to let go of her power-hungry and deceptive behavior and decides to act out of love and humility. Her head has become clear, and more than ever she becomes aware of the situation. All her shallow and hypocritical thoughts seemed to have dissipated, and she sees the Misfit as a child of God just. The grandma notices a voice crack in the Misfit’s voice and thought he was about to cry; she murmurs, “Why you're one of my babies. You're one of my own children” (O’Connor 458-459)! The grandmother calls the Misfit one of her kids despite the crimes he has already committed; God’s spirit may have entered the grandmother and is attempting to offer redemption to the Misfit since she has now accepted it. The still figure of the grandmother is described as “her legs crossed under her like a child’s and her face smiling up at the cloudless sky” (459). God has given the grandma salvation now, and her spirit has a journey to heaven via the cloudless sky. O’Connor shows the protagonist to be hypocritical, but the protagonist found salvation and appeared happy after accepting God and feeling love towards the Misfit; the Misfit appeared to reject God when he shot the grandmother in the chest after she was trying to lend him a hand. The grandmother was able to find salvation through the violence the Misfit brought.

The Grandmother wants the Misfit to receive salvation from God, so that he can be forgiven for his sins. Even though the Grandmother got the family into this mess, she can still be viewed as the hero.

As the Misfit questions the grandmother about what Jesus did and didn’t do, she is rewarded with grace when momentarily her head clears and she says, “Why you’re one of my own children! (O’Connor 433)”. She does not mean this in a literal sense, but as in they are both humans and equal. The grandmother was experiencing compassion and clarity. Although the grandmother had died, the grandmother granted her grace right before her death. The Misfit had said that there was “no pleasure but meanness (O’Connor 432)” in life earlier in the story, he then opposed that there were any pleasure in life at all. With this encounter with the grandmother, the killing didn’t seem to give him the happiness as intended, leading the reader to believe that he too may change. Both the Misfit and the grandmother had spoken of previous experiences that they’ve had. These characters presented themselves as unhappy with the present but things seemed different in the past, as if they stopped looking for the goodness in themselves because the world around them was not promising to it

When this happens the Grandmother not once pleads for the life of her Son, daughter in law, or two grandchildren but only her own life. Throughout the story the grandmother does not even have respect for her own family, comparing Bailey’s wife head to a cabbage, and always being disrespectful to her own grandchildren. The saddest part about it all is when the Misfit takes the Grandmother into the woods and the grandmother believes ‘that she is to good and to well-dressed and the fact that she is a true women that the Misfit will not kill her. And then before the Misfit pulls the trigger on the grandmother she stats that the Misfit is her child, this is the moment in the story when the grandmother is admitting she is not morally superior to others and this is the turning point in the story, but to late to sorry. The grandmother is shot dead.

Nonetheless, Misfit still holds grudges from his past life experience, this made him strong hearted not to forgive his past. He took revenge and angry at the innocent people and slaughtered them. I am wondering how the grandmother knew who the person was, or she was just acting out on her own intuition. Also, Misfit, started comparing himself with Jesus Christ, and he began justifying his evil actions, saying if he saw Jesus Christ raised someone from the dead, he would not be doing this evil deed. They both started arguing about Jesus Christ and the resurrection of dead people, if it actually happened or did

The reader is able to see the fate of the family is never actually in the hands of the family. The family’s fate is truly in the hands of the Misfit. The idea of fate is shown through the sky when it conveyed as: “...see no sun...see no cloud either” (O’Connor 19). The glimmering sun would mean the family would live, where the dark clouds would mean the family’s death. Besides the sky showing the status of the family’s fate, their fate is controlled by a large outside factor, the Misfit. The Misfit is the one who decides who lives, and who dies. The Misfit is the one who has the gun, who has the men, and who has the mental advantage over the family. The reader realizes that the Grandma’s fate is sealed when she becomes the last one standing. The setting is illustrated as: “There was a not a cloud in the sky...there was nothing around her but wood” (O’Connor 25). As the Misfit stands over the Grandma, the clear open sky indicates that the Grandma has died and gone to heaven. Even with all of the Grandma’s pleads for her life, nothing was able to change her