the Misfit and the Narrotor

There are many things we do know about the Misfit in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and there are many things we do not know about the narrator of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” In “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” the Misfit is an escaped convict who looks educated, and had apparently killed his own father. He is gray-haired, smart—and chillingly exact. He is also polite, and can kill without much remorse. In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” is the narrator a relative to the old man? Is he a companion or a servant? While the Misfit continues to be adamant about being wrongfully accused in “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and the narrator’s relationship to the old man remains undefined in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” there is nonetheless one thing of which we can be certain of. They are mad. The Misfit and the narrator’s psychological states make these stories more than just thrillers; these stories are an examination of abnormal psychology. An analysis of the Misfit in “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and the narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart” will provide evidence

Hallucinations seem be quagmire for the Misfit and the narrator in both the stories. The Misfit exhibits signs of delusion when he believes that he didn’t kill his father and that his father died of a respiratory tract infection. In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” a number of readers may think the story is one of the supernatural. They would see the heartbeat as the return of a ghost coming back to haunt the narrator. But the tale is more than just a creepy, eerie account of a murder. The heartbeat exists in the narrator's mind. Maybe he hears his own heartbeat and that triggers his hallucinations, but the fact that he hears the heartbeat is a measure of his insanity, and not a ghost returning to seek revenge. The narrator said, “I foamed—I raved—I swore! I swung the chair upon which I had been sitting, and grated it upon the boards, but the noise arose over all and continually increased.” (201) If the heartbeat were real, the police would hear it. As they chat with the narrator, they never hear a sound yet the constant beating of the heart gets louder for the narrator as we see him slide over the edge of control.

The Misfit can simply be labeled a “psycho” because of his ability to kill without any measure of repentance. His violent life probably started at an early age due to child abuse. While he is psychologically unstable, he does seem very calm and collected in light of an merciless situation. His nonchalance after shooting the grandmother is evident when he “too

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