838 O’Connor, Flannery
penitentiary said what I had done was kill my daddy
but I known that for a lie. My daddy died in nine-
teen ought nineteen of the epidemic flu and I never
had a thing to do with it.” The Misfit is not part of
any family, and the loss of his family forced him into
criminality.
The name Misf it, which the criminal has given
himself to indicate that it is impossible for crime
and punishment to perfectly add up, also implies
that he is apart from any family. He simply does
not fit in anywhere—he is a social outcast. The
Misfit expresses his dislike of children repeatedly,
commenting that they make him nervous, thus
underlining his own isolation. The grandmother
begins reaching out to the Misfit by suggesting he
put on one of Bailey’s shirts; he ends up taking the
one Bailey is actually wearing after shooting Bailey.
When the Misfit confesses that, had he been
there during Christ’s earthly ministry, he would
be a different man, this touches the grandmother
profoundly: “His voice seemed about to crack and
the grandmother’s head cleared for an instant. She
saw the man’s face twisted close to her own as if he
were going to cry and she murmured, ‘Why, you’re
one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!’
She reached out and touched him on the shoulder.”
Thus, in the story’s conclusion, the family structure
is radically challenged and turned upside down. The
grandmother, in her moment of grace, acknowledges
the Misfit, who has just killed Bailey, to be her son.
The family O’Connor has in mind is God’s, into
which sinners are welcomed by adoption as they
repent. This grace is completely unmerited and thus
apart from the individual; it depends on Christ’s
sacrifice on the cross alone and welcomes characters
as “bad” as the Misfit if they choose to accept it.
Wiebke Omnus
reLIGIon in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”
As is typical of Flannery O’Connor’s fiction, her
short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is a
commentary on the universal need for the grace and
hope of Jesus Christ, as the author introduces char-
acters that are extremely ungracious and situations
that are completely devoid of hope. Through a fatal,
personal encounter with the character of the Misfit,
a mass murderer of whom the grandmother warns
from the very beginning of the narrative, O’Connor
engages with the Christian gospel in a very direct
manner. Having built up the theme of human good-
ness throughout the text, goodness is radically chal-
lenged and redefined in the story’s conclusion.
During her dialogue with the Misfit while her
family is taken away and brutally killed one after
the other, the grandmother appeals to the killer’s
sense of goodness, which she associates with not
being from a “common” family, but also with
goodness of heart and the fact that she herself is
“a lady” and therefore cannot be killed by a good
person. O’Connor, however, is concerned with an
entirely different kind of goodness, one that the
grandmother does not even begin to understand
until it completely overwhelms her in the face of
death, and that the Misfit shies away from, as he
recognizes it as being life-consuming—the good-
ness of Christ.
When the grandmother calls for her son Bailey,
unaware that he has just been murdered, the Misfit
informs her that “Jesus was the only One that ever
raised the dead . . . and He shouldn’t have done it.
He thrown everything off balance. If He did what
He said, then it’s nothing for you to do but throw
away everything and follow Him, and if He didn’t,
then it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few
minutes you got left the best way you can—by kill-
ing somebody or burning down his house or doing
some other meanness to him.” Apart from Christ,
proclaims the Misfit, goodness does not make any
sense; he dares to face and point out the logical
consequences of atheism. If there is no meaning
in life, no higher standard of right and wrong, no
absolute truth, there is no reason not to be a mur-
derer. Through the Misfit, O’Connor presents the
consequences of a life that truly does not acknowl-
edge God and puts the self at the center of human
existence.
Having proclaimed that he is simply not sure of
Christ’s existence, although he would like to have
witnessed his ministry just to be certain, the Misfit
lives his godless life to the fullest. In that sense, he
is the only sincere character in the story, acknowl-
edging that true Christianity cannot be halfhearted.
Prior to encountering the Misfit, the grandmother’s
faith is without fruit; her life is not shaped by