Compare And Contrast The Misfit And The Grandmother

In the story both The Misfit and the grandmother are misfits. They both have certain things that make them not fit in the modern society of the story. The grandmother who is old and traditional. The Misfit who is a criminal. This makes the irony between the Misfit killing the grandmother even stronger.
The grandmother is an old woman who believes that the ways of the world should be kept the same and not change. She calls a black child ‘pickaninny’ and has many references to “back in her day.” She has very traditional ways and values. She dresses very fancy and proper in a nice dress while the mother in the story wears pants which are not considered to be ladylike. She dresses this nicely even though they are just going to be sitting in a car

for a road trip but she wants to be able to be identified as a lady even if she were lying dead on the side of the road.
She is a misfit in the way that she is the personification of old values and traditions. The old racist values of the old south are not accepted in this new south. for this reason, the grandmother is a misfit and can’t be accepted fully in this new south. She needs to change her

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thought process and stop calling black people racist things and she needs to drop her old ways if she wants to fit in with society.

Sadly, she is not doing any of these things and she is very out of the times
The Misfit is a convict who was convicted of killing his father but he does not remember doing so and he was put in prison for it. He later he escaped and he is on his way to Florida which is exactly where the family is going and where the grandmother is trying to tell them not to go. The Misfit named himself a misfit because he knew that the crime he was accused of did not fit him and he did not remember committing the crime.
The Misfit does not fit in with society because of the fact that he is a convict and he will always be viewed as one no matter how much time passes. He is on a mission to escape to Florida but he comes across the family and the grandmother when they crash their car in the woods. He has his friends that are with him shoot the whole family and then he shoots the grandmother himself after talking with her for a while. Before he kills the grandmother, she asks him if he prays and if he believes in God and heaven. She says that she can tell that he is a good man and that he would never shoot a lady. She is trying every tactic to keep herself alive and to keep the Misfit from doing any harm to her. All of this talking only stalls the process of him killing her and he still kills her in the

end.
The irony of him killing her is that they are both misfits. The fact that one misfit is taking out another misfit in the world is very ironic. It also shows that there will always be misfits in the world because as far as we know, the Misfit did not die or get captured so he is still on the loose. Misfits are inevitable and unavoidable.
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As can be seen, both the grandmother and the Misfit are misfits in the story and can never really be accepted in society. The characters of the Misfit and the grandmother are immensely strengthened in this way and the irony of the killing is much more than it would be without it. The definition of a misfit is “a person whose behavior or attitude sets them apart from others in an uncomfortably conspicuous way” and we can clearly see that the grandmother is a misfit in this story.