The grandmother's mention of the Misfit serves as foreshadowing and irony and adds to the characterization of the grandmother. The grandmother is a manipulative and rather selfish woman who does not have a good relationship with her son, her daughter-in-law, or her grandchildren. The grandmother's purpose for discussing the Misfit reveals her self-centeredness. Although she insists on accompanying her son's family on their vacation, she tries to change their destination. She wants to visit people...
The grandmother's mention of the Misfit serves as foreshadowing and irony and adds to the characterization of the grandmother. The grandmother is a manipulative and rather selfish woman who does not have a good relationship with her son, her daughter-in-law, or her grandchildren. The grandmother's purpose for discussing the Misfit reveals her self-centeredness. Although she insists on accompanying her son's family on their vacation, she tries to change their destination. She wants to visit people she knows in Tennessee, so she brings up the Misfit as a reason to persuade her son not to go to Florida. She is being dishonest and manipulative.
The discussion of the Misfit so early in the story, as well as at the gas station, serves to foreshadow the tragedy at the end of the story when the family has a car accident. The Misfit happens to see the accident and takes advantage of the family's misfortune to gain a different vehicle and clothing. The grandmother hints that the Misfit is a frightful criminal. The reference is vague, but "what he did to those people" must be particularly gruesome if the grandmother does not even want to mention it aloud.
There is a significant amount of irony surrounding the grandmother's comments about the Misfit. It's ironic that her selfish advice, if her son had heeded it, would have resulted in the lives of six people being spared. She also says she "couldn't answer to [her] conscience" if she took her family into a part of the country where that criminal was loose. Unfortunately, the grandmother's conscience is not highly tuned. She is dishonest about her warning, she sneaks a cat into the car when she knows her son would forbid it, and she ends up telling lies about the home she wants to drive by. If she was a person who had a functioning conscience herself, the family wouldn't have been on the deserted road and the cat wouldn't have caused the car accident. The Misfit, of course, turns out to be lacking in conscience as well, but his crimes are significantly more wanton. Yet O'Connor draws a significant parallel between the grandmother and the Misfit, and having the grandmother mention the Misfit early in the story helps create that ironic correlation between two characters that should be very different from each other--but really aren't.
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