As soon as you start reading this
story, you immediately get a feeling for the family dynamic. What I picked up
on instantly was how the members of the family treated the grandmother. In most
scenarios—real or fiction—grandparents are loved and respected, but here, the
grandmother was openly disrespected by her own son and daughter-in-law.
On the very
first page of the story, the family kind of ignored the grandmother while she
talked about the Misfit and brushed her off like she’s a senile old lady who doesn’t
know what she’s talking about. And when the car crashes, her son yells at her
and then yells obscenities at her again when she recognizes the Misfit and
calls him out. If I had to feel bad for any of the characters, it’d be the
grandmother because she never intentionally does anything wrong, it’s just
plain bad luck. Her memories getting jumbled, the cat causing the crash, her
panicking and calling the Misfit by name, all things that could have happened
to anyone in that situation. None of it is forseeable. Even when their lives are being threatened,
the poor grandmother is still being disrespected by her son and the murderer is
the one who is standing up for her. If that isn’t completely, 100% backwards, I
don’t know what is.
I don’t feel
badly for the rest of the family and I certainly do not feel bad for the
Misfit. Giving yourself a clever nickname and blaming it all on your messed-up
childhood is not an excise to go around killing innocent families. The way I see it, everyone gets dealt either
a lucky or a crappy hand in life and using that as a justifiable reason for
what the Misfit did makes zero sense to me.
You raise a good point when you mention that you either get dealt a lucky hand or you get dealt a crappy hand, Judy, but rather than looking at it as the Misfit’s hand being dealt, what if you look at it from the point of view of the family. I mean, they did get into the accident because the grandmother convinced them to go down a road that wasn’t where she though, placing them where the Misfit was going to be. The cat ended up causing the crash because it basically attacked the father. The grandmother seemed to have been dealt the bad hand in life. If you look at the relationships that were in the story, nearly no one had respect for the grandmother, oddly except for the Misfit. Her own son was rude to her. That couldn’t be the best hand to be dealt. In the end, the entire family was killed, which doesn’t seem to be the best hand in life either. They were doomed from the beginning. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time, something that couldn’t have been predicted. As a reader, we might have been able to see this coming since the foreshadowing of the Misfit being in Florida was in the beginning of the story, but as characters in the story, there would be no way of knowing that they would have been in the same place at the same time of the Misfit. If you look at whose fault it is in another light, you can see that the Grandmother is to blame for the entire situation, rather than the Misfit, but merely because she was dealt a bad hand in life.
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