A Troubled Soul

A Troubled Soul
    In ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find’ by Flannery O’Conner, The Misfit, is a significant, somewhat symbolic, victim of past abuse and has a sick, immature unawareness. His mind is raw; it’s not his fault. The Misfit is the unlikely protagonist, through what he says, his past, and his name.
    What The Misfit says leads us to assume that he was victimized through negative accusations and the fact that people looked down on him and didn’t really have much nice to say about him. From what The Misfit says, you gather that his father put him down, “My daddy said I was a different breed of dog from my brothers and sisters . . . he’s going to be into everything!” (O’Conner, 8) The ‘head doctor’ accused him of killing his father, “It was a head doctor in the penitentiary that said what I had done was kill my daddy . . . and I never had a thing to do with it.” (9) The Misfit claims and seems to believe that his daddy died from the flu.
Mr. Misfit is even a victim of his own mind; he has a different, slower, and an innocently twisted mindset.
    His past. The Misfit’s past also says more about him. He didn’t really get much of a positive influence from his dad: “Daddy was a card himself . . . you couldn’t put much over him. He never got in trouble with the authorities though. Just had the knack of handling them.” (9) Doesn’t he sound like such a positive, rule-abiding role-model? On the contrary, he’s not.
In the story, The Misfit is inclined to tell the ladies a few of his past occupations; makes you wonder, what had he been through and how he got into those situations, huh? Judging by what was said about his past, you’d think he’d be traumatized. “I never was a bad boy that I remember of . . . but somewhere along the line I done something wrong and got sent to the penitentiary. I was buried alive.” (9) He says that he doesn’t remember doing anything wrong, that could be because his subconscious mind wants to block out parts of his memories; another...