Each character in A Good Man is Hard to Find has their own flaws and weaknesses. The two who are the easiest to condemn are the grandmother and the Misfit. The grandmother is characterized by being rather judgmental and manipulative. She lies to her grandchildren, telling them that “there was a secret panel” in a house she wanted to visit, rightly predicting that they would make a fuss, forcing Bailey to make the detour. The Misfit is also someone most people would view as evil, murdering innocents in cold blood. However, these two deeply flawed characters both receive some form of grace.
The grandmother, in the moments before her violent death, reaches out to the Misfit, and tells him that he’s one of her “babies,” that he’s one of her “children.” The text tells the reader that “her head cleared,” which shows that she isn’t insane in her dying moments, but perhaps is more lucid than before. She has been touched by a thread of compassion, which she was devoid of in the beginning of the story. The grandmother realizes that, despite the Misfit’s vile actions, he is also a human being. This, for her, is her form of salvation — she dies serenely, trying to comfort the Misfit.
The Misfit, after being wrongly imprisoned for his father’s murder, commits heinous crimes. He believes that the injustice done to him wasn’t a simple mistake, but is God’s fault. Obviously, his punishment wasn’t right, but his way of coping with what happened is also wrong. The Misfit says that he “signs” the crimes he later perpetrates himself. In trying to match the consequences to the crimes he commits, he ultimately leads himself further down the path of destruction. But after his conversation with the grandmother, and after experiencing the love she had for him despite knowing all the atrocious acts he committed, the Misfit starts to change. Earlier, he lives by the maxim “no pleasure but meanness,” but at the end of the story, he displays some type of weariness of it all, saying that there’s “no real pleasure” in killing. Perhaps the touch of grace the Misfit had experienced could cause him to leave the criminal life.
A Good Man is Hard to Find shows that everyone can receive redemption, no matter if it is a criminal with a hardened heart, or a hypocritical old lady. Although it is true that punishments given on Earth will never be fair, God can, and will, freely grant even the most imperfect people salvation.