In Flannery O’Connor’s short story “A Good Man Is Hard To Find”, a family going on a trip is murdered by a criminal calling himself The Misfit. When the family gets into in accident while driving, The Misfit and his assistants find and kill them, the grandmother last and only after they have had a discussion at length about repentance and fairness. The grandmother tries to convince him that praying to Jesus will relieve him of his sins and The Misfit is only adamant that he is doing fine on his own, insisting that he is doing fine as he is and that no matter what he does he will be punished for it. This suggests that the lesson the story teaches on the fairness of life is that life simply is not fair, but a person does to some extent control how it treats them.
An example of this is what The Misfit says about what he did that landed hin in the penitentiary: “I forget what I done, lady. I set there and set there [in the penitentiary], trying to remember what it was I done and I ain’t recalled it to this day. Oncet in a while, I would think it was coming to me, but it never come.” The Misfit has entirely forgotten what he did that first got him in trouble, but naturally, nobody believed him, and people only assumed he was a simple-minded boy lying to get out of trouble; that, and “they had the papers on me”, or in other words, legal documentation of his crime. But the fact that he could not remember what that crime was is a sign that he is, perhaps, mentally troubled, and therefore should have a lighter sentence, and it is not fair to him that he does not.
The Misfit, once out of the penitentiary, continues to commit crimes that, again, he cannot remember, and he is sentenced accordingly to those crimes, again no adjustment being made for his lack of memory. But should there really be an adjustment? Even though The Misfit does not remember these crimes and claims that “I can’t make what all I done wrong fit what all I gone through in punishment”, seeing his punishments out of proportion to his offenses, it is him who continues to choose to commit these crimes.
So while it may be unfair that he is continually punished for things he cannot remember doing, it is completely his own fault that life is treating him that way, for it is his own, free-willed choice to continue committing crimes.
While The Misfit’s life is certainly unfair in that he is punished for what he cannot remember doing, it is almost completely his own fault that life is treating him that way. For while if the penitentiary workers had believed him, he may not have gone down his current path, it is his own, free-willed choice to continue on it, showing that life certainly is not fair but how life treats you is mostly your fault.