The Misfit’s Guilt
In Flannery O’ Connor’s short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” a typical Georgia family goes on vacation to Florida, but are murdered by an escaped convict named “The Misfit. In the following quote the protagonist explains why he calls himself “The Misfit.” “Jesus threw everything off balance. It was the same case with Him as with me except he hadn’t committed any crime and they could prove I committed one because they had the papers on me…of course…they never shown me my papers. That’s why I sign myself now. I said long ago, you get a signature and sign everything you do and keep a copy of it. Then you’ll know what you done and you can hold up the crime to the punishment and see do they match and in the end you’ll have something to prove you ain’t been treated right. I call myself “the Misfit” because I can’t make what all I done fit what all I gone through in punishment.” The quote can be taken to mean many things, but there are two possibilities that are the most convincing. Either “The Misfit” was not guilty of a crime when he was punished or was indeed guilty and did deserve the punishment, but, as a psychopath generally does, he reasoned that his crime was not a “real” crime.
The most obvious option is the first one which, if you know Flannery O’Connor’s writing, makes it the most questionable. The Misfit says that when he was sent to the penitentiary he was “buried alive.” Because the atmosphere of a penitentiary in the time the story is set (1940’s rural America) was like that of a medieval dungeon—men would be sentenced to prison for years to live with abuse guards and inmates alike and suffer the mental trauma of living in a stone box—often men would come out worse than they went in, and the effects on a innocent man would be compounded even further. The Misfit never admits to committing a crime, but he also never denies it. This can be explained away by assuming that he was not actually guilty of a crime, but spent years in...