Is the Misfit the devil?

Famous for her rather eccentric and certainly unique literary style, O’Connor produced fiction in which the action of divine grace is worked in a mysterious and even grotesque way. Oftentimes, it is hard to understand the religious message that O’Connor tried to convey to her audience. However, in “On Her Own Works,” she explains to us the gist of her short story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," which is "something more than an account of a family murdered on the way to Florida." The fatal encounter between the character Grandmother and the serial killer “the Misfit”mysteriously allows the action of grace in the Grandmother's soul to take place. As O'Connor writes:

“I often ask myself what makes a story work, and what makes it hold up as a story, and I have decided that it is probably some action, some gesture of a character that is unlike any other in the story, one which indicates where the real heart of the story lies. This would have to be an action or a gesture which was both totally right and totally unexpected; it would have to be one that was both in character and beyond character; it would have to suggest both the world and eternity. The action or gesture I’m talking about would have to be on the anagogical level, that is, the level which has to do with the Divine life and our participation in it…. It would be a gesture which somehow made contact with mystery.

There is a point in this story where such a gesture occurs. The Grandmother is at last alone, facing the Misfit. Her head clears for an instant and she realizes, even in her limited way, that she is responsible for the man before her and joined to him by ties of kinship which have their roots deep in the mystery she has been merely prattling about so far. And at this point, she does the right thing, she makes the right gesture….

I don’t want to equate the Misfit with the devil. I prefer to think that, however unlikely this may seem, the old lady’s gesture, like the mustard-seed, will grow to be a great crow-filled tree in the Misfit’s heart, and will be enough of a pain to him there to turn him into the prophet he was meant to become….

In such a picture, grace, in the theological sense, is not lacking. There is a moment in every great story in which the presence of grace can be felt as it waits to be accepted or rejected, even though the reader may not recognize this moment.”

Therefore, God works in a mysterious way. Like Manley Pointer in "Good Country People," the Misfit is not ridiculed by his creator. O'Connor suggests that the grandmother's "moment of grace" might induce the Misfit to be reborn too. It is possible that the Misfit has been transformed by his mysterious experience with the grandmother.