FLANNERY O'CONNOR'S MISFIT AND THE MYSTERY OF EVIL

Renascence, Winter 2004 by Desmond, John

His refusal casts him into a posture of moral self-sufficiency and isolation, signified in part by his act of naming himself the Misfit. In this act of naming he resembles another of O'Connor's proud self-namers, Hulga Hopewell in "Good Country People," whose chosen ugly name "Hulga" serves as her defense against admitting her ordinary human frailty and need, as well as being a badge of her pride. Naming, as Walker Percy has pointed out, is being.2 So also, false naming reveals non-being, a refusal to speak truly of who or what one is. The Misfit says that his name signifies his awareness of the disproportion between his actions and their punishment (151). On the one hand this disproportion confounds him. But on the other hand he uses it to claim his difference from the general run of society. The Misfit's father, he explains, said he was a "different breed of dog" and added: "it's some that can live their whole life without asking about it and it's some has to know why it is, and this boy is one of the latters. He's going to be into everything!" (148). The Misfit certainly claims his difference from people like the Grandmother and her family, who seem to accommodate themselves to the mystery of evil by ignoring it or glossing it over with platitudes. If so, then on this level the Misfit can be seen as O'Connor's scourge, a prophetic figure who raises the question of evil and redemption by Christ to a largely unbelieving audience in a stark and violent fashion. seen in this way, O'Connor's challenge to her audience gives the Grandmother's bland assessment of the Misfit - that he is "not common" - an ironic ring of truth. he appears as a man suffering deep anguish over his predicament of doubt, as one oppressed by a sense of entrapment in a world of unrelieved guilt, yet also as one willing to acknowledge the profound mystery of his predicament.

The Misfit's desire for a rational system of human justice in which actions and consequences can be meaningfully "balanced out" is good, as I have said, but it is inadequate to explain the mysterious human condition. It cannot comprehend or meliorate the mystery of evil. The Misfit is caught between absurdity and faith. he rejects belief in Christ yet he recognizes that a world in which actions and consequences cannot be made sense of leads ultimately to a world in which logical distinctions between good and evil collapse. As he says, it becomes a world in which there is "no pleasure but meanness." Still, the fact that he perceives his dilemma reveals a man keenly attuned to the mystery of good and evil; in fact, one can say, a man of deeply religious sensibility like that O'Connor saw in Albert Camus.3

The stumbling block to faith for the Misfit, as he tells the Grandmother, is the mystery of Jesus's resurrection from the dead:

"Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead . . . and He shouldn't have done it. he thown everything off balance. If He did what he said, then it's nothing for you to do but thow everything away and follow Him, and if he didn't, then it's nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can - by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness . . . . " (152)