Connecting the theme of this story to the title of this short story, "A good man is hard to find" is pretty confusing. At first I thought it was going to be a story which revolved around what a man can supply financially since there was a lot of indications of material goods such as their discussions about men in the story having things such as cars, and how wealth was an important factor for what they found appealing in men. Then the story did a complete 180, they got in a car accident and were killed one by one while the grandmother tried to convince the "misfit" that he was a decent man. We then found out the misfit's father was murdered, and the misfit was the accussed murderer.
It seemed as if the misfit's perception on what murder is was conflicting with reality. He said "I found out the crime don't matter. You can do one thing or you can do another, kill a man or take a tire off his car, because sooner or later you're goin to forget what it was you done and just be punished for it." Is this suggesting that if they got in an accident the events that happen afterwards aren't his fault?
I also found a couple quotes at the end of the story to be confusing. The misfit says, "She would of been a good woman, if it had been somebody to shoot her every minute of her life" Why does he believe she is a bad woman?
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Some things to consider: "Misfit" is ambiguous, here, right, and perhaps the greatest irony--is it the reverse of what we think? The criminal claims to be the "misfit"--but what is it that doesn't "fit" in the story? Could this partly be about world views that don't quite fit realities? What happens when different worlds collide? To a great extent, this is a story about values and world views--belief systems that sustain us, and how those may often be illusons--if not self-delusionary. Consider the grandmother as representing a kind of (deep South inflected) world view, and how that world view--what allows her to make sense of the world--is brutally ripped away--what's left? Consider some of the imagery toward the end of the story--description of the sky, what she sees as she looks up for the last time. Other image patterns in the story--such as red dust (characteristic of the Gerogia landscape), would also be worth pursuing... and a key image, at the turning point of the story, when the car is overturned-- from a symbolic pov., what's overturned?
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