Grâce
O'Connor utilized the dark and morose in her writing to reveal beauty and grace. In the story, violence reveals divine grace. Divine grace, or God's unmerited favor, is a concept fundamental to humanity's salvation in Christian theology. Christians believe the imperfect can be reborn spiritually, i.e. people can be saved by grace through Jesus Christ. While the two seem to be different, according to O'Conner's Catholicism the grandmother and the Misfit both are the same at their core: sinners in need of grace. Abbie Harris says in her short article, "The Misfit is blatantly sinful and enraged at the concept of God's grace, and the Grandma masks her sinfulness with respectability and chooses to treat God as something that she can accept or ignore depending on her situation".