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

Renascence, Winter 2004 by Desmond, John

The Misfit's pain at the Grandmother's touch is instantly transformed into a hatred of the gratuitous act of charity, which he then answers with a brutal execution. What the Misfit fears is the mystery of love, the demands of love which the grandmother mysteriously responded to when faced with the criminal's suffering, and her own impending death. In her case, evil issued finally in good, or as Weil expressed it, evil exposed the good. But if the encounter with evil exposed the good in the grandmother, the final predicament of the Misfit is more complicated, more mysterious.

As I noted earlier, the Misfit acts under the delusion that his actions are somehow good, i.e. good for him. Since he cannot make sense of his spiritual condition, he now tries to reduce ethical mystery to a perverse pleasure-pain principle. Initially he told the Grandmother: "No pleasure but meanness." Yet his encounter with her touch has exposed his need, his human vulnerability. In his crucial final remark, he shifts from the earlier "No pleasure but meanness" to "It's no real pleasure in life." he has again failed to liberate himself from his predicament through violence, failed to "balance out" his deeds and find the meaning of his life. he himself is his own deepest mystery, a profoundly human condition which he can neither fathom nor abide. His last statement, that there is no "real pleasure" in life, shows that what he thought might bring pleasure, i.e. acts of meanness, has also proven to be bankrupt, a hollow illusion.

In the end, the Misfit's spiritual and mental suffering continues and intensifies, for with the failure of his code, his awareness of the gap between good and evil has widened. His violence is projected back onto himself as self-hatred. Perhaps at some future time his knowledge of this interior chasm will bring about the collapse of his self-begotten identity as a "Misfit," and an acceptance of his broken humanity. O'Connor suggested the possibility that he might ultimately be brought to such a conversion. She called the Misfit a "prophet gone wrong," and referred to the grandmother's touching him as "like the mustard-seed," which "will grow to be a great crow-filled tree in the Misfit's heart, and will be enough of a pain to him there to turn him into the prophet he was meant to become" (Mystery and Manners 110, 112-13). The Grandmother's touch may bring him to the point where the mystery of good and evil is finally subsumed in the mystery of love. For the Misfit, evil may, in the end, through the grace of charity, bring about his ultimate good.

Notes

1) Flannery O'Connor. "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." Collected Works, 151.

2) Walker Percy. "Naming and Being." Signposts in a Strange Land, 130-39.

3) Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, eds. Mystery and Manners, 160.

4) Flannery O'Connor. The Habit of Being, 40.

5) Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, 65.

6) Mystery and Manners, 109-113.

Works Cited

O'Connor, Flannery. "A Good Man Is Hard To Find." Collected Works. New York: Library of America, 1988.