Thursday, August 2, 2012

I am stuck on writing a good introduction for this short story; can anybody help me? Also the Misfit says, at the end of the story, "She would...

Let me address your second question first, in regard to the Misfit's statement about the grandmother being a good woman if she would have been threatened with death every moment of her life.  In the end of the story, the grandmother seems to experience a kind of epiphany: her "head cleared for an instant."  She looks at the Misfit, a terrible criminal who has committed any number of heinous transgressions (given the fact that he's had each member of her family shot by his cohorts), and she says, "'Why you're one of my babies.  You're one of my own children!'" and she reaches out to touch him.  All along, she's been telling him that he's a "good man" and that he doesn't have "common blood," phrases that he understands make her exactly the kind of person who has persecuted him his entire life.  But in this moment, right before her own death -- when she knows she is staring death in the face -- she realizes his humanity and sees him as more similar to herself than different.  Class distinctions, education, they all melts away, and she sees him as a human being in pain.  The Misfit realizes that such a realization could only have taken place when she knew herself to be in mortal danger; only that would be enough to erase all the distinctions she's held on to her entire life.  Therefore, he claims that she would have been a good person if she'd always been in just this type of danger.


I think an interesting and perceptive introduction could address this phenomenon.  One might think that being on the verge of losing one's life would actually cloud one's judgment with fear, but such danger has the opposite effect here.  Knowing that she will be shot any moment actually clears the grandmother's head and allows her humanity to come to the fore.  It also helps to show that judging others based on such distinctions as class, race, education, financial status, and so forth only do danger to one's humanity.

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