Timothy Allusion in "A Good Man Is Hard To Find", The

Renascence, Summer 2000 by Fike, Matthew

O'Connor identifies the moment of grace in the story when she writes: "The Misfit is touched by the Grace that comes through the old lady when she recognizes him as her child, as she has been touched by the Grace that comes through him in his particular suffering. His shooting her is a recoil, a horror at her humanness, but after he has done it and cleaned his glasses, the Grace has worked in him and he pronounces his judgment: she would have been a good woman if he had been there every moment of her life"(The Habit of Being 389). As Clark nicely notes, the grandmother's touch parallels Paul's mention of the laying on of hands and "emphasize[s] the grace that accompanies charismatic physical contact" (68).6 Commenting on 2 Timothy, Martin Dibelius and Hans Conzelmann point out, "Here, as elsewhere, the hand serves as the means of transferring power, be it upon the sick for healing, upon the young, the weak, or the religiously impure for the purpose of blessing (Mk 10. 13ff), or upon those who did not have the Spirit for transmitting the Spirit" (70). The grandmother's humanness is evident, but the parallel in Timothy suggests that her touch, like the laying on of hands, provides a conduit through which God's grace flows to The Misfit. He shoots her, then, because he has been touched by the divine love he has spent his whole life trying to deny. Yet we know that grace has worked in him because he goes from saying that meanness is his only pleasure to admitting, "It's no real pleasure in life" (133). Viewed from the vantage point of 2 Timothy, the touch counters Stephen C. Bandy's objection to a theological interpretation: "To insist at this moment of mutual revelation that the Grandmother is transformed into the agent of God's grace is to do serious violence to the story" (116).

The significance of the Timothy allusion abides not only in moral and spiritual parallels but also in the life experience of the epistles' author, which foreshadows the story's climax. Like Hazel Motes in Wise Blood (Chapter 13), The Misfit and, in a different way, the grandmother, whose "head cleared for an instant" (132), have a transformational experience on a roadway, whose prototype is Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus where Christ confronted him. Paul's experience of the risen Christ transforms him from a "persecutor" into a "propagator" of Christianity-- admittedly the greatest apostle of the early Christian era ("Paul" 187). O'Connor comments on Paul, "I reckon the Lord knew that the only way to make a Christian out of that one was to knock him off his horse" (The Habit of Being 354-55). So it is with the grandmother who, a moment before her own death, finally acts according to the religion she has merely believed all her life. Mere belief is not enough: one must implement and embody belief in acts of love, like the touch, which has a dramatic effect on The Misfit. But sometimes a transformation like Paul's or the grandmother's requires a powerful stimulus, and therein lies the truth of The Misfit's statement, " She would of been a good woman ... if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life" (133).