The Grandmother is the first to recognize The Misfit after the accident, and becomes the reason for her whole family’s death. She begins pathetically pleading with The Misfit, telling him that he is a “good man”. She justifies this by saying that he comes from good blood and there fore must be a good man. Here again The Grandmothers justification of why The Misfit is a good man is strange and rather shallow. The only reason that she calls him a “good man” is because she does not want to die and she tries to illicit pity from him by saying that he is “good man” and that “good men” do not shoot women. This seems to echo her encounter with Red Sammy in that she seems to feel that “good men” take control of women and should treat women in a completely different way to how they treat men, this fits in with the patriarchal values of her time. A time gone by. The Misfit counters her, after the third time she says this, by saying that he is not a “good man” but he is not the worst.
The Misfit, although he is a murderer, seems to have a far better concept of what a “good man” is. He himself has become what he is through reactions of society, the law in particular. He speaks to The Grandmother about Jesus and how he wishes that he could have been there when Jesus was alive, as then he may have been able to see a good man. He may have known that there was hope for society as if there was ever one good man then there may be others. As such it is not the case and he never saw Jesus so he has not much faith that there are good men any where, and he may as well not be good either. He then begins to draw parallels between himself and Jesus. He tells The Grandmother that he calls himself the Misfit because his punishments do not match up to the crimes that he has committed. This he says is the same for Jesus and in this way they are similar Not only this but also that Jesus, by raising the dead, threw this out of balance and the punishment that The Misfit has received have thrown his life out of balance.
He also says to The Grandmother that it appears strange to him that “one is punished a heap and another ain’t at all.” This is significant in that The Misfit has been jailed for the crimes he committed, even those he was not sure that he committed, where as The Grandmother has taken her family to their deaths and as a result surely should be punished. It is there fore fitting that she is killed as she is being punished for what she has done in life. The Misfit kills no one but The Grandmother and he later states the reasons, apart from punishing her, that he has done so. He does so almost to redeem her, “She would have been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life”. Although she is killed The Misfit feels that perhaps it is not enough that she has died once for all the pain that she has caused through out her life.
All of these elements of the story make the reader feel that Flannery O’Connor has used the title in an extremely interesting way. In that the opinions of the two lead characters, The Grandmother and The Misfit, greatly vary on the subject of what a good man is. The Grandmother echoes the past in her idea of what a good man is, she holds the apparent Christian point of view on the subject. A good man is one who prays, looks after his wife and treats a lady well and differently as well as keeps up the surface impression of a good man. It is a very patriarchal view. This is contrasted by The Misfits idea of a good man, of his opinion that there are in fact no good men. He looks at the words in a far deeper way, a way that looks at the goodness with in a human being, not just the apparent goodness on the outside. He is also far more cautious of the words, which indicates reverence for them.
It can therefore be seen that Flannery O’Connor has indeed used this title very effectively to express the idea that there are no good men, or women in the world. She does so through the use of the words through out the story as well as paying attention to how they are said, where they are said and to whom. The title is therefore a very complementary one to the story that she is trying to tell.
