Near the end of the story, the Misfit tells the grandmother that he calls himself the Misfit “because [he] can’t make what all [he] done wrong fit what all [he] gone through in punishment.” In other words, his punishment has not fit his so-called crime; it is, in a very literal way, a mis-fit. He explains that he was originally accused of having murdered his father, but he claims that this cannot possibly be true, because his father died of the Spanish flu during the pandemic that took place in 1919. He explains that prosecutors somehow “had the papers” on him, though, and he did not even learn what he had been convicted of until the psychiatrist in the prison explained it to him.

Therefore, the Misfit had not actually even committed a crime, but he was sentenced to prison. He felt that he was surrounded by walls and that he had done nothing to deserve such treatment by society. As a result, he decided to go ahead and turn to a life of crime in order to balance out the harsh punishment he received for no good reason. If he could make his guilt fit society’s terrible treatment of him, it would be a way for him to make sense of things again.