As O’Connor says, readers “should know what is going to happen in this story so that the element of suspense in it will be transferred from its surface to its interior.” Her intent is to use the story as an instrument of Christian faith, to show the faith of the grandmother and the good-evil dichotomy. However, my thoughts go more along the lines of Stephan Gresham in that I see the piece only in an agnostic light. The malicious stranger is simply that, evil in the world. The grandmother’s epiphany and preaching only showed how useless her faith was, in the end. O’Conner herself makes the point that “it is the extreme situation that best reveals what we are essentially.” One has to question though, what good it is if the grandmother was only able to reach her epiphany at the end of her life, up until which she had spent her time ignorant, and manipulating those around her for her own selfish desires. O’Conner ends with foreshadowing that the grandmother was able to touch the heart of the Misfit, but the cynic in me believes that it was just a drop off the back of the malicious stranger.
Powered by:
top