Do you think The Misfit really "killed" his father when he shot the grandmother?"A Good Man is Hard to Find" by Flannery O'Connor

The Misfit explains to the grandmother that he doesn't
know why he was locked up in jail. He says that the prison "head doctor" explained to
him that it was "because I killed my daddy" but then the Misfit explains that his father
died of influenza and was buried in the Mount Hopewell Baptist Cemetery. The implication
is that the prison psychiatrist probably was psychoanalyzing the Misfit and wondering
why he was a psychopath and probably came up with the theory that he hated his father
and each time he killed someone, he was symbolically killing his father. By the way the
Misfit reacts with such anger to the grandmother's talk of Jesus and praying, his father
might have been a religious fanatic, perhaps that beat him or forced religion down his
throat, and it could have made him "snap". The evidence of this is that the Misfit is
careful to mention that his father is buried in a Baptist Cemetery, and he remembers the
specific name of it, ironically called "Hopewell". So now, each time he kills someone,
it is as if he is acting out his hatred of his
father.

O'Connor leaves much to the reader's imagination in
her stories because she believed the grotesque characters needed to unfold their stories
on their own, without too much extraneous writing by
her.

So, when the Misfit killed the grandmother, he could
have been vicariously killing his father. Notice that when the grandmother touches him
and calls him one of her babies, it is then that he jumps back and shoots her three
times. So, this connection that the grandmother tries to make with him, on a human and
spiritual level, could have been the final thing that set him off. It is clearly evident
that the Misfit is a psychopath, so he could be "killing" his father each time he kills
someone else.