After The Misfit’s henchmen, Bobby Lee and Hiram, take the family into the woods the grandmother pleads with him to spare her life. She begs him to repent. After some dialogue the grandmother has an epiphany (Schott 142-44, 146). She murmured. “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!” She then attempts to touch The Misfit’s shoulder and gets three bullets in the chest. He then makes the observation that “She would have been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”Whether The Misfit will also be cleansed by this experience is, in O’Connor’s words, “another story”. However, she does leave two symbolic clues: a collision causing cat and a dirty pair of spectacles. Following the shooting, the Misfit “put his gun down on the ground and took off his glasses and began to clean them… Without his glasses, The Misfit’s eyes were redrimmed and pale and defenseless- looking.” Unarmed, unspectacled, and unprotected, The Misfit now perceives life very differently. In a moment of unconscious warmth, he picks up the trouble-causing cat. Previously pampered by the grandmother but largely neglected by the critics…, Pitty Sing slinks into the story. With the benefit of an animal’s sixth sense and with the security of a feline’s nine lives, the cat was at the time responding to the changed killer by “rubbing itself against his leg.” The Misfit articulates his transformation in the last words of the story. Earlier he had snarled that there was “No pleasure but meanness.”… [But at the end] The Misfit changes his conclusion about meanness: “It’s no real pleasure in life.”However, O’Connor previous description of The Misfit suggests that his emotional scars run too deep for a permanent change. When he puts the cat down and his glass...
