Why does the Misfit say that the grandmother "would have been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life"?"A...

At the moment that the Misfit's face twists close to hers
as though he were going to cry, the grandmother
murmurs,

"Why
you're one of my babies.  You're one of my own
children!"

It is at this
moment that the grandmother is redeemed, for she recognizes her own depravity and sin in
the spiritually grotesque Misfit.  This black character then reacts by shooting her the
spiritually three times through the chest.  As he orders her to be taken off, he
says,

"She
would have been a good woman...if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute
of her life."

because he
realizes that the grandmother's salvation requires an extreme situation since "Jesus
thre things off."  While the title of O'Connor's story supports the satiric side of the
author, the use of a depraved man is what is required before the grandmother recognizes
her own sins.  Receiving grace in her martyrdom, the grandmother is shot the religious
number and she collapses with her legs crossed--on the dark side of the cross where the
experience of grace is violent, not sentimental. 

Flannery
O'Connor's extreme use of violence as a catalyst for a greater vision of spiritual
reality is illustrated in her story, "A Good Man is Hard to Find." Critic Patrick
Galloway writes that according to this philosophy,

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the person in a violent situation reveals those
aspects of his character that he will taken with him into eternity; hence the reader
should approach the story by looking to such mmoments as an oppotunity to peer into the
soul of the character.

Such,
indeed, is the case with the grandmother of the short story, "A Good Man is Hard to
Find."