At the end of the story, the Misfit and his criminal
associates have dispatched the rest of the family, and The Misfit has taken the bright
yellow shirt with blue parrots that Bailey had been wearing. The only two that are left
are Grandmother and The Misfit. Grandmother is talking with The Misfit the whole while
trying to flatter her way into his good graces so that he spares her
life.
Grandmother is a complaining, nagging sort of person who
apparently unceasingly causes trouble for others in her family through her selfishness
and carelessness, trouble such as insisting they detour to visit an old plantation in
Georgia that is in reality in ... Tennessee. At the moment that she realizes that The
Misfit is going to take her life also, she stops being self-centered; she stops her
incessant barrage of words; she reaches out to someone else in some show of
compassion:
She opened and closed her mouth several times
before anything came out ... she found herself saying, "Jesus. Jesus," meaning Jesus
will help you,
When
Grandmother reaches out to touch The Misfit saying, "You're one of my own children!" she
confirms the hint that comes earlier, "his face was as familiar to her as if she had
known him all her life but she could not recall who he was," and we realize Grandmother
is in fact the Misfit's mother.
It is because she is his mother that
he can indirectly assert that she wasn't much of a good woman and that the shock of
facing a violent end to her life has forced her out of her harmful selfishness and,
therefore: "she would of been a good woman ... if it had been somebody there to shoot
her every minute of her life." In other words, if she had had a similar shock every
moment of her life, she would have been sincere, caring and thoughtful--as she was for a
moment just before her end--instead of complaining, nagging, spiteful and unceasingly
troublesome.
No comments:
Post a Comment