Compare and contrast the misfit and grandmother. Do they come to seem more different or more alike over the course of the story? IN what ways?

When the Misfit and his gang come upon the grandmother and
her family after the car accident, the reader sees almost immediately that the Misfit is
older than the other men, so like the grandmother, he is the oldest one in the
group:

He was
an older man than the other two. His hair was just beginning to gray and he wore
silver-rimmed spectacles that gave him a scholarly
look.

At this point, the
grandmother believes he is someone she knows, that perhaps she "had known him all her
life." This reference points out that they do seem to have some similarities and perhaps
the Misfit in some ways represents what the grandmother could have been had she not had
her faith, which trumped her negative nature and kept her from turning into something
totally evil, like the Misfit.

Both the grandmother and the
Misfit are controlling individuals. The grandmother's controlling nature has turned her
into an odious and annoying woman, but not a criminal because her religion has kept
things in check. The Misfit's controlling nature has turned him into a criminal because
he does not have any saving faith in his life. In fact, he has turned against religion,
as he tells the grandmother at the end of the story. He has totally gone over to the
dark side and this is why he can kill a family in cold
blood.

I think that as the Misfit and grandmother's
personalities are revealed, the reader sees how unlike they are. The Misfit seems to
grow more and more evil the more the grandmother talks and forces him to look inside of
his soul and see the evil man that he has become. In contrast, the more the grandmother
talks, and as her family is killed, one by one, even the children, the closer she relies
on her faith. She asks the Misfit if he prays, and then she begins to pray, out loud, as
she realizes he is killing her family and is going to kill her. The more she prays and
the closer she comes to relying on her faith, the angrier the Misfit gets and we see how
anti-faith he is. The grandmother keeps trying to appeal to the Misfit's sense of right
and wrong, but he is a sociopath and does not have any. When he kills the grandmother,
he notes that she could have been an OK woman if she had not talked too much, but this
is because what she talked about was Jesus. In the end, he tells his sidekick, Bobby
Lee,

"Shut up,
Bobby Lee." The Misfit said. "It's no real pleasure in
life."

Faith is an important
part in all of Flannery O'Connor's short stories and they really cannot be interpreted
apart from this.