What the Misfit Look's Like

Law enforcement composite sketch software drawing of  The Misfit based on his description from "A Good Man Is Hard To Find".
There's a lot more literary characters on the site if this kind of thing interests you:

http://thecomposites.tumblr.com/

A Happy Ending for All Southern Literature Characters Is Hard To Find

Back in high school  I had an English teacher who spent an entire fall and winter trying to teach us southern literature. I say “tried” here not because he was a bad teacher (actually very much the opposite was held true by all who had the pleasure of sitting in his classroom) but because we were young and he was wise and not too many of us had been pleased with having books of the bible assigned for summer reading.  None the less I got one of my favorite quotes on the South that fall, which I can still recall as: “As a whole the south has had a long history of religion, hospitality and violence. We’ll bake you a casserole but we’ll kill you too”.  While reading Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man Is Hard To Find I was reminded of that quote ten-fold.  In this book the unlikeable characters talk about nostalgia, the weather and Jesus.  By the end an entire family is shot to death and the final line is left to the killer who declares “{There's} no real pleasure in life”(p.462).  It doesn’t get much more southern then that,ladies and gentleman. 
The most prevalent characters in the book are the grandmother and the mass murderer who calls himself The Misfit. After a car accident the family comes face to face with The Misfit who is forced to kill everyone after the grandmother reveals his identity. As the family members are taken to the woods to be slaughtered bit by bit the ignorant grandmother often insists to The Misfit that he’s a good man who would never shoot a lady and tells him multiple times that he should pray or put his life in Jesus.What she fails to understand is that The Misfit, although a mass murder, has a very strong, personal moral code.  He’s gotten it through much personal reflection and it can be explained in three key quotes. He believed he was not a good man “‘…but I ain’t the worst in the world either’”(p.459).   One might wonder what he would consider worse then mass murder but this idea of not being the “worst” he takes very seriously. He was imprisoned for a crime he doesn’t remember doing and through that experience he’s come to the moral code idea that there are no morals, just self. “‘I found out crime don’t matter. You can do one thing or you can do another, kill a man or take a tire off his car, because sooner or later you’re going to forget what it was you done and just be punished for it.’” (p.460) These conclusions of his were not formed completely discounting of the religious ideas that the grandmother keeps desperately throwing up at him. It is clear that The Misfit had thought about and considered God and Jesus when he was trying to make sense of his life. It is this that allows him in the end to give her the ‘checkmate’ of rebuttals before killing her.“‘Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead," The Misfit continued, "and He shouldn't have done it. He shown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it's nothing for you to do but thow away everything and follow Him, and if He didn't, then it's nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness,’"(p.461) The raising of the dead here is most likely a reference to the book of John where Jesus raises his friend Lazarus from the dead. It’s thought by some that Jesus waited for his friends death before coming into town so that he might perform this miracle of raising the dead. When it’s interpreted in such away, the story of Lazarus can be used as a lesson that God might wait for a persons situation to go from bad to worse before answering prayers so that He can perform a magnificent feat. But any high school Southern Literature overview will teach you that, unfortunately for most characters of the genre, this feat never comes.

O’Connor, Flannery. “A Good Man Is Hard To Find.” The Norton Introduction to Literature. 9^th ed. Peter Simon.  New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, 2005. 451-62.