More on Flannery O'Connor's Misfit

The Misfit

Modern film has nothing on Flannery O’Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find, though it isn’t hard to imagine Robert De Niro as The Misfit playing against Jessica Tandy as the Grandmother. While both are strong characters, it's The Misfit that makes the show. His compulsion to inflict mayhem on a world that has failed him is the least of his sociopathic tendencies. To the utter depths of his soul he is a monster. Throughout his short appearance in the story, he exerts a god-like power over life and death, with commission to dispense it.

Like Abraham who pled with the Angel of the Lord to spare Sodom and Gomorrah for the sake of a single righteous man, The Misfit sees himself as a man whose task it is to find, in his own time, a good and worthy man. But unlike Abraham, he is not content to allow God the decision, and feels no compunction in pulling the trigger himself should a victim find himself unworthy of the life he owns. In fact, he feels it his duty. That he’s a cold-blooded killer, O’Connor iterates from the outset, and while his crimes aren’t spelled out, they are certainly implied. But his crimes are secondary to their motivation. Like Diogenes with his lamp, The Misfit is also searching through a dark world for a patch of light, hoping to see for himself what Jesus saw in mankind. When Jesus raised the dead, The Misfit explains, "He thown everything off balance." For when a man dies, he is supposed to remain dead. And this is the Crux Grammata of The Misfit’s whole existence: to find a man so good that Jesus would raise him from the dead. The Misfit, therefore, is become the antithesis of Christ, a dark messiah to challenge the messiah of Light. "Here's one!" He seems to shout heavenward, having planted three nails in the grandmother’s heart. "Is this one good enough?" And because he gets no answer, he continues on, wishing all the while that he understood what Christ had done. "I wisht I had been there." He says. "It ain’t right I wasn’t there, because if I had been there I would of known and I wouldn’t be like I am now." The Misfit feels he’s been denied his right as messiah-- despite his black countenance --to have been present at Lazarus’ resurrection. It was his right to ask Jesus, "Why?" And having been denied this right, Jesus is therefore responsible for The Misfit’s present state.

But O’Connor’s Misfit is also on a quest for perfection, in both life and death, measuring the world, circumstance, and humanity against the unstained perfection of the Madonna-figure of his own dear mother. The Misfit expected better from the grandmother. Without a doubt, he finds her the sole cause of her family’s destruction. He dealt with her patiently, hoping to see some redeeming quality in her. But she wasn’t good enough. Who could measure up to the standard of The Misfit’s mother? God never made a finer woman. Of his only personal victim in the story, he says, "She would have been a good woman, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." Some people never learn anything of humility, and it didn't take long for The Misfit to recognize the lack of it in the grandmother. It was pride that killed her and her family, that and her inability to let sleeping dogs lie. It is quite probable she and her family might have survived their encounter with The Misfit and his gang of cutthroats, had she simply kept her mouth shut. "You’re The Misfit!" she said. "I recognized you at once." And he is both pleased and dismayed at being known.

Underlying everything is a well-honed sense of self-preservation, precariously balanced by a desire to preserve life, rather than take it. It is his statement to the grandmother that is most telling, "...it would have been better for all of you, lady, if you hadn’t of reckernized me." He doesn't want to kill. "I would hate to have to," he says. But with a word to his disciples, her family is led off in groups and murdered. It is too late for them. Surely he can't be as bad as people have made him out to be. There's good stock in him. He comes from good people. Why, he was one of her own babies, one of her own children....

Bang! Bang!! Bang!!!

And there she lay, nailed to the cross of her own presumption. How dare she compare herself to the purity of his holy mother? How dare she stain a good woman’s memory? It is his sense of preservation that drives him to murder her-- the preservation of blessed memory --for a woman who hasn’t enough sense to keep her mouth shut in the face of a known killer, is too much of a liability. Jesus won't raise this one. She isn’t good enough. And the secret of his whereabouts is safe.

It is the world’s turn to be judged, and it’s The Misfit’s sole purpose. He is both angel and devil, both humble and righteous, and no one is above his law. Even innocence isn’t safe within The Misfit’s sphere of influence. His own daddy’s heart was pure gold, and if God wouldn't raise him from the dead, is anyone worthy?


ELAshley
April 11, 2001