The Misfit: the Devil’s Advocate

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Much of Flannery O’Connor’s fiction focuses around the function that violence plays in a world filled with evil. In her writing O’Connor centralizes around contemporary themes involving Christ and the devil. She is not ambiguous with her perception of the devil; rather she says the devil is: “an evil intelligence determined on its own supremacy” (411). In O’Connor’s short story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”, she incorporates her southern Catholic religious beliefs into the lives of her characters. O’Connor’s theology can be seen in the portrayal of the main characters, The Misfit and the grandmother, in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”. In this story The Misfit, an escaped convict and murderer, represents the epitome of supreme evil. “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is the story of a family’s twisted vacation that results in each one of the family members deaths. The story’s setting begins in Atlanta, Georgia with a family argument about where to go on vacation. Everyone except the grandmother, a selfish religious old woman, agrees on Florida as their destination. She tries to persuade her family to abandon their original plans, saying that there is an escaped killer on the loose, foreshadowing events that lead to the family’s murder. The grandmother is central to the rest of the story’s plot involving an accident where the family’s car flips resulting in a confrontation with the escaped convict, The Misfit. The grandmother, pointing out The Misfit’s identity, essentially dooms herself and her entire family. As a last plea to The Misfit, the grandmother attempts to manipulate his evil motives with a transcendence of religion that fails and ultimately drives him to murder her. Therein lays the story’s central conflict surrounding O’Connor’s incorporation of The Misfit as “an evil intelligence determined on its own supremacy.” A characterization of The Misfit’s history, lack
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