What do we learn from the conversation between The Misfit and thegrandmother while the others go out to the woods? How would you describe The Misfit’s outlook on the world? Compare it with the author’s from whatever you know about Flannery O’Connor and from the story itself
What will be an ideal response?
- As O’Connor herself says about this story, “The heroine of this story, the Grandmother, is in the most significant position life offers the Christian. She is facing death. And to all appearances she, like the rest of us, is not too well prepared for it. She would like to see the event postponed. Indefinitely” (Excerpt from “On Her Own Work”). It may seem hard for some students to accept the possibility that the grandmother is the story’s heroine, but a close reading of the long conversation between The Misfit and the grandmother may help your students see the story more clearly.
The Misfit reveals to the grandmother many details about his past: his many jobs and several experiences. The most life-changing of these experiences occurred when a psychologist accused him of killing his father—although he says his father died from the flu epidemic—because the authorities “had the papers” on him, he was thrown in the state penitentiary. There, The Misfit develops his peculiar worldview, identifying himself with Jesus Christ, since they both suffered unjustly for crimes they did not commit. He laments that they never showed him the supposed papers, and the injustice of years of punishment has led him to a hedonistic philosophy of life; and his pleasure comes from violent murders.
The reader may be surprised to learn that The Misfit believes the Bible and interprets it literally, going so far as to agree with the grandmother’s religious cliché, “if you would pray . . . Jesus would help you” (par. 118), but he replies that he doesn’t want any help because he’s “doing all right by myself” (par. 121). He is neither agnostic nor atheist, but he believes that Jesus’s miraculous resurrection has “thrown everything off balance” (par. 133). He named himself The Misfit, explaining “I can’t make what all I did wrong fit what all I gone through in punishment” (par. 129). He admits that he has done wrong, and a sympathetic reader may be able, like the grandmother, to see behind this murderer is a man who deeply mourns the wasted years he spent in a prison for a crime he did not commit.
The grandmother is not the only one changed by this encounter. The Misfit is also changed. A subtle shift takes place in his attitude about his violent murders, going from believing there’s “no pleasure but meanness” (par. 134) to the final paragraph’s “Shut up, Bobby Lee, . . . It’s no real pleasure in life.”
At first glance, The Misfit and O’Connor have nothing in common, but perhaps what they share may be one of the story’s central mysteries—a deeply rooted belief in the literal death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The difference, of course, is that O’Connor embraces this conviction with faith, while The Misfit struggles with doubt, claiming that he needs visual evidence of Jesus’s resurrection in order to “throw away everything and follow Him” (par. 134).
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Fill in the blank(s) with the appropriate word(s).
Match the questions and answers.
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El paciente necesita un _______________ de hígado.
Fill in the blank(s) with the appropriate word(s).
Who says the following to whom: "You call me unfeeling. If you could only see/The nature of your own feelings"?
Fill in the blank(s) with the appropriate word(s).