In his essay “A Good Man’s Predicament,” Madison Jones
essentially takes issue with Flannery O’Connor’s own interpretation of the very end of
the story. Jones offers a different interpretation and suggests that his own reading
may be truer to the actual phrasing of the story and to reality (at least as reality is
generally understood) than is O’Connor’s interpretation. He implies that the two
interpretations may not be incompatible, but he suggests that if they
cannot be reconciled, then his interpretation makes better sense of
the story.
In an essay on “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,”
O’Connor herself had argued that God uses the grandmother to touch The Misfit, both
literally and figuratively. This touch was a moment of grace – an opportunity for The
Misfit to transform his life spiritually, if only he would take advantage of the
opportunity. By reaching out to The Misfit (O’Connor had argued), the grandmother truly
and finally lives her Christian faith:
The Grandmother is at last alone, facing the
Misfit. Her head clears for an instant and she realizes. even in her limited way, that
she is responsible for the man before her and joined to him by ties of kinship which
have their roots deep in the mystery she has been merely prattling about so far. And at
this point, she does the right thing, she makes the right
gesture.
The fact that the
grandmother was killed by The Misfit as a result of her gesture meant nothing to
O’Connor. We are all destined to die, but the grandmother’s gesture had given a depth
of meaning to her life that it had hitherto lacked. Her dead body is ultimately
unimportant; her spiritual salvation is all that truly
matters.
Jones resists this Christian interpretation, or at
least he suggests that it is not the only one that makes sense of the story. Instead,
he argues as follows:
Given the Misfit's image of himself, [the
grandmother's] words and her touching, blessing him, amount to intolerable insult, for
hereby she includes him among the world's family of vulgarians. One of her children, her
kind, indeed!
In other words,
The Misfit kills the grandmother not because God uses the grandmother as an instrument
of grace but because her touch violates his pride. Jones leaves open the possibility
that The Misfit may perceive the grandmother as an instrument of
God, but he argues that there is no reason why readers must share that perception. The
story, in other words, makes perfect sense from a secular perspective and using secular
psychology. There is nothing, necessarily, miraculous about the grandmother’s gesture
or The Misfit’s response. The Misfit may even perceive the
grandmother as an instrument of God, but readers do not necessarily have to share this
perception in order to appreciate the story or find it
meaningful.
A critic of Jones’s interpretation might argue
that he fails to discuss various details in the end of the story that support O’Connor’s
reading (particularly our final view of the grandmother, “with her legs crossed under
her like a child's and her face smiling up at the cloudless sky”), but Jones’s reading,
as he himself suggests, may not necessarily conflict with
O’Connor’s.
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