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In "A Good Man is Hard to Find," what motivates the Misfit's criminal behavior and family killings?
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The Misfit's criminal behavior and family killings in "A Good Man is Hard to Find" are driven by his psychopathic nature and lack of remorse. He views violence as a way of life and rationalizes his actions as insignificant. Additionally, he kills the family to prevent them from identifying him as an escaped criminal, exacerbated by the grandmother recognizing him.
The Misfit apparently does not need much motivation at all. Hurting and killing others has become a way of life for him. He is insensitive to the lot of others. He does not value anything, least of all human life. He might be a psychopath and would, therefore, have no remorse for having taken the lives of others at all. The Misfit is what we would call a "career criminal," which means that, in his contention, his survival depends on taking from others and doing harm. Anyone who threatens his position should, therefore, be done away with. It is his psychosis and his predatory lifestyle that drive him to kill the family.
The text shows that the Misfit possesses great self-knowledge. He knows that what he does is wrong, but he does not feel apologetic or sorry for either himself or his victims. It is evident that he chose this...
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path at an early age. He was not driven to it by harsh circumstances, and he is not a victim of abuse. The Misfit is soulless, and it appears that he was born this way. His actions and demeanor are not products of his upbringing. He does, to an extent, rationalize his criminality when he states: "I found out the crime don't matter. You can do one thing or you can do another, kill a man or take a tire off his car, because sooner or later you're going to forget what it was you done and just be punished for it." He is essentially admitting that his actions, no matter how horrendous they may be, are insignificant to him, so much so that he will forget them and just endure whatever punishment he may have to endure for his wrongdoing.
One can suggest that the Misfit kills the family to avoid detection or discovery. He has, however, already been identified. Even though the family might have reported sighting him if they had been set free, he would have been long gone if the authorities should have arrived at his temporary lair.
In the final analysis then, the Misfit is a ruthless, soulless, killer. He murdered an entire family just because he could.
One reason that the Misfit has to kill the family is that the grandmother recognizes him as an escaped criminal. Certainly, it is possible that The Misfit would have killed the family anyway, but when the grandmother shrieks, "'You're the Misfit! . . . I recognized you at once!'" The Misfit says that "'it would have been better for all of you . . . if you hadn't of reckernized me.'" In other words, there is no way, now that she has recognized the criminal, that he can let her go; he has to kill her so that she does not give away his location. He had already been waving his gun around and behaving as though he is agitated, but her recognizing him seems to have made it impossible for him to spare the family's lives.
The Misfit explains that the psychologist in prison said that he had killed his father, but he knew "'that for a lie'" because his father died of influenza in 1919. He says that he calls himself The Misfit because he "'can't make what all [he] done wrong fit what all [he's] gone through in punishment.'" He was thrown in prison for a crime he did not commit, and, since then, he has gone ahead and committed crimes in an effort to create some balance: to make his crimes fit the punishment (rather than the other way around). He's been so mistreated and pigeonholed by society that it has made him cruel and vicious.
Understanding or having an appreciation of a character's circumstances is a huge asset when discussing or analyzing character motivation. The most important aspect of the Misfit in Flannery O'Conner's "A Good Man is Hard to Find" is that he is a psychopath, a man bent on destruction, violence, and cruelty. O'Conner richly develops his total lack of remorse and hardened edge in his dialogue with the grandmother:
"I found out the crime don't matter. You can do one thing or you can do another, kill a man or take a tire off his car, because sooner or later you're going to forget what it was you done and just be punished for it."
His motivation for the killing the family is two-fold: (1) He kills them because he can, and it makes him feel powerful. (2) He is on the run from the law and does not wish to leave any witnesses behind to go to the police.
In "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," why is the Misfit tormented?
The Misfit is tormented because he has rejected familial, societal, and spiritual laws and customs. Like many real-life murderers, serial killers, and tyrants, his perspective on what is “good” or “evil” is predicated on a hedonistic desire to do as he chooses for a brief moment of pleasure. “No pleasure but meanness,” he tells the grandmother, expressing that he enjoys cruelty and violence. The fact that he hates law and order becomes clear during his conversation with the grandmother as he attempts to justify himself by blaming others. In explaining each justification for his behaviors, he conveys his bitter distaste for the rules that family, religion, and society have tried to restrict him with.
Firstly, he explains to the grandmother that he had good parents. He says, “God never made a finer woman than my mother and my daddy’s heart was pure gold.” This fact surprises the grandmother, who assumes that criminals are forged by poor upbringing, perhaps at the hands of an extremely abusive family group. The Misfit’s complaint about his dad—and the reason that he killed him—is because his dad noticed how the Misfit could not help but “be into everything" as a child. In other words, his dad tried to prevent the Misfit from getting into trouble as a small boy and breaking the rules the family placed upon him. Having a heart of gold, his dad probably did this in the name of good child-rearing: “You couldn’t put anything over on him,” the Misfit says, bitterly expressing that his attempts to get away with rule-breaking in his own home were never successful.
Secondly, the Misfit complains that society did him an injustice by putting him in the penitentiary. He says, “I never was a bad boy that I remember of...but somewhere along the line I done something wrong and got sent to the penitentiary.” The Misfit knows very well that he got sent to the penitentiary for killing his own father, but in his mind, the punishment of being locked up did not fit the crime. His freedom, he thinks, is worth more than another human being's life. His father’s restrictive rules were good enough reasons for taking his life in the mind of the Misfit. This shows that the Misfit's ideas about crime and punishment are a far contrast to that enforced by the judicial system of his society. The death penalty or life in prison could have been suitable punishments; in the eyes of the law, the judicial system was easy on the Misfit. In other words, the Misfit is motivated to have a life of crime because he feels his crimes are an exercise of freedom in light of an oppressive society. Murdering the innocent does not merit losing personal freedom from his perspective, and so he continues to murder after being released from prison as a way to protest the “unfair” shackles of societal bondage. His dislike for societal rules is further emphasized by how he mocks social mores, especially Southern chivalric behavior, throughout the story. For instance, in a moment of “politeness” to the ladies present, he puts on the yellow parrot shirt of the man he just murdered, whom both women dearly loved.
Thirdly, the Misfit hates spiritual laws, especially the law of grace. Understanding this concept takes some theological comprehension of O’Connor’s religious beliefs. Basically, from a Christian perspective, when Jesus came to die on the cross, he came as a scapegoat for the sins of mankind. In other words, mankind’s sins deserved punishment, and rather than demanding payment, God sacrificed a part of himself (his beloved son) to die for the sins of everyone in the world (past, present, and future). Thus, Jesus dying was an act of grace and justice simultaneously. The Misfit, being one of O’Connor’s “Christ-haunted” Southern grotesque characters, blames Jesus for the predicament he is in. He says that if Jesus did rise from the dead, then there was “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.” The Misfit does not want to change his evil, hedonistic ways, so he blames “not knowing” whether or not God actually is offering redemption to him as a reason for continuing to kill, steal, and destroy.
When the grandmother realizes how lost the Misfit is—how tortured his soul is by his own skewed perspective, which separates him from family, society, and God—she reaches out in a gesture of grace: “ ‘Why, you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!’...The Misfit sprang back as if a snake had bitten him.” The gesture of the grandmother literally reaching out to the Misfit represents the gracious gesture of God from a biblical view: God looked at sinful humanity, each person individually, and told them that they were worth redeeming in spite of their sins. The Misfit, who does not want to change his ways, sees this as an “evil” gesture (which is represented by a snake, a biblical symbol of evil), and shoots the grandmother three times (a biblical number representing the trinity and the number of days Jesus was dead before rising again). In this climactic moment, the Misfit seals the reason for his feeling tortured, which is ultimately his choice to be separated from the goodness of God.
From what the Misfit says to the grandmother in his conversation with her, it seems clear that the biggest reason why the Misfit is so tormented stems from his own feelings of being trapped and locked up in a society which seems to offer him no hope or possibility of a meaningful future outside of breaking the law. Note what he says to the grandmother in this fascinating quote:
"Turn to the right, it was a wall," the Misfit said, looking up again at the cloudless sky. "Turn to the left, it was a wall. Look up it was a ceiling, look down it was a floor. I forget what I done, lady. I set there and set there, trying to remember what it was I done and I ain't recalled it to this day. Oncet in a while, I would think it was coming to me, but it never came."
The Misfit, for whatever reason, is a character who is profoundly disengaged from society and from the basic norms and values that govern day-to-day living. He sees no possibility of ever entering "normal" life as the grandmother tries to persuade him to do, and is clearly alienated from society as well as from himself. Although we are not given the full details of his background and what has helped to produce his character, it is clear that this feeling of being a literal "mis-fit" in society is something that is behind his criminal activity.
How did the Misfit get his name in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find"?
An escaped convict, the man who calls himself "The Misfit" renamed himself because he could not make what he had done align with the punishment that he had been given. But, there is a deeper meaning to his name, one that he does not understand.
As the grandmother and her family drive toward their vacation site, at the insistence of his mother, Bailey turns the car down a dirt road. Unfortunately, her cat, whom she has sneaked into the car, comes out of hiding in a basket and springs onto the shoulder of Bailey, causing him to lose control. He has jerked the steering wheel so much that the car rolls over and lands right-side-up in a gulch near the side of the road.
After the family climbs out and sits in the ditch trying to recover from the accident, they soon see a car slowly approaching them. The grandmother waves both arms over her head in order to attract attention. Ironically, she waves at the escaped criminal called the Misfit about whom she has previously warned her family. When the car reaches them, the grandmother shrieks, "You're The Misfit!"--a fateful mistake. Bailey curses his mother. She tries to ameliorate the situation by insisting that she knows The Misfit is "a good man," but he merely says, "I pre-chate that, lady." Then, he has one of his men take Bailey into the woods and shoot him.
Terrified now, the grandmother continues to appeal to his goodness, asking him if he ever prays, but he replies, "Nome." [No M'am]. He tells the grandmother that he was put into prison, but he did not understand why. A psychiatrist told him he had killed his father, but he knew this was a lie because his father was already dead. Then he adds that he does not know what his crime really was; he was "just punished for it." Nor was he shown any papers which defined this crime. So, he now signs every paper written about him and writes his name as "The Misfit."
When the grandmother desperately appeals to him, "Jesus will help you," The Misfit says, "Yes'm" in a distracted manner; he then adds,
"Jesus thrown everything off balance. It was the same case with Him as with me except He hadn't committed any crime and they could prove I had committed one because they had the papers on me. Of course,...they never shown me my papers. That's why I sign [everything] now....Then you'll know what you done and you can hold the punishment up to the crime...."
Although uneducated and apparently psychotic, the Misfit is disturbed by the seemingly lack of logic as to why he was incarcerated. Thus, he likens his case with that of the Crucifixion since the death of Christ was also a "misfit" for any cause. Finding life existentially absurd, the Misfit has determined that there is "[N]o pleasure but meanness."
In the end O'Connor's message in her story is that a person must believe in order to understand--as the grandmother finally does in her moment of grace--not understand in order to believe. This latter view is that of the Misfit. And, for this reason, he is truly misfitted to a normal life.
This Misfit gave himself this moniker when he was younger because he believed his punishments did not fit his crimes (or lack thereof); the repercussions for his behavior literally did not fit -- they were a mis-fit. He says that he was "'buried alive'" in jail for the crime of killing his father. However, he claims that he didn't kill his father; his father died of influenza, and he was not the victim of murder at all. He says that he was surrounded by walls, and he "'set there and set there, trying to remember what it was [he'd] done and [he] ain't recalled it to this day.'" He believes that the crime itself doesn't matter; eventually, one will forget what they did and just be punished for it. He believes that Jesus threw off the balance between responsibility and punishment: Jesus took a terrible punishment when he'd never committed a crime, and now the world operates in just the same way. Thus, the punishment never fits the crime for someone like the Misfit, and that's where his name came from.