The ending of Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard To Find" has received much critical attention. But most critics have failed to realize that spectacles can tell as well as see; that cats can point as well as purr. O'Connor makes good use of such subtle details in the crucial closing lines. Having survived the shock of mass murder, the reader still finds himself face-to-face with the pathological killer, suitably named "The Misfit." Whether his shooting of the grandmother will transform this murderer is, in O'Connor's words, "another story." But she does leave us with two suggestive clues: a dirty pair of glasses and a catalytic cat, Pitty Sing.

Following the shooting, The Misfit "put his gun down on the ground and look off his glasses and began to clean them…. Without his glasses, The Misfit's eyes were redrimmed and pale and defenseless-looking." Unarmed, unspectacled, and unprotected, The Misfit now perceives life very differently. In a moment of unconscious warmth, he picks up the trouble-causing cat. Previously pampered by the grandmother but largely neglected by the critics …, Pitty Sing slinks into the story. With the benefit of an animal's sixth sense and with the security of a feline's nine lives, the cat was at the time responding to the changed killer by "rubbing itself against his leg." The Misfit articulates his transformation in the last words of the story. Earlier he had snarled that there was "No pleasure but meanness."… [But at the end] The Misfit changes his conclusion about meanness: "It's no real pleasure in life." However, the casebook that O'Connor compiles on The Misfit previous to the resolution suggests that his maladjustment is too deeply ingrained for a whole and permanent change. When he puts the cat down and his glasses back on, his perception of life will revert back again—though the glasses will be cleaner, as perhaps will his life. (pp. 19-20)