There is always a chance in the flowing of the significance as Greimas emphasizes in his analysis of the semiotic square of passions. In the Greimassian model, the potential stage can sometimes on the very transit moment be situated between the actualization and the realization stage (Greimas and Fontanille 25-6). Thus, the potentialization stage, I would like to point out, preserves the power of transformation. Since the subject-actant could make a detour by returning to the potentialization stage instead of moving forward directly from the virtualization to the actualization, I suggest that we take the potentialization stage as an ambiguous stage. Hence, by virtue of its pivotal position, it preserves the opportunities to develop into different forms, according to the subject-actant’s trajectory. Transformations, consequently, could be viewed as the results of different understandings that the subject-actant obtains at the potentialization stage.
While The Misfit shoots the grandmother to death, he is working
compassion
realization
potentialization Grandma’s and Misfit’s superficial understanding and judgment
violence actualization
virtualization
Grandma’s dying
words and gesture
towards his new recognition of the world. It is his vicious action that helps make the grandmother’s transformation and realization possible. Without any self-consciousness of their roles in the Bailey family car accident, The Misfit and his henchmen become the unwilling instruments of the narrative and help make the existential transformation possible to the self-centered grandmother. However, the violent act brings forth not violence, nor revenge, but a signifying gesture, which keeps flowing in the network of meaning and significance.
In a certain sense, the germination phase of The Misfit’s realization converges with the stroke of the grandmother’s death.14 He sees clearly the grandmother’s drawbacks, and he reveals his viewpoint bitterly yet truly by saying sarcastically after the grandmother’s death: “She would [have] been a good woman, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life” (363). The grandmother has no great moral defects, however, as The Misfit clearly sees, and she only needs someone to keep reminding her to abandon her superficial concepts of manners and religion. A threatening violence might be the way to transformation: it forces the grandmother to forget momentarily her banal beliefs of clichés, her selfishness, and her domineering attitudes. But since she has no chance to die over and over again as The Misfit sarcastically comments, the grandmother obtains no self-knowledge at the end of her life. Although in The Misfit’s sudden twisted face, she sees a flash of possibility that a miracle might take time to work out.
The grandmother never obtains a complete understanding of herself, even at the moment of her death. She has no talent for the philosophical thinking of religion, and nor does she have the gift of seeing her own selfishness behind her behaviors. Religious faith and belief, if not empty terms, are just pertaining to their surface values in her shallow understanding.
The Misfit, on the contrary, reaches his disbelief by a much more
14 I would like to emphasize that in this story, the realization stage of the grandmother is not the same as that of the narrator’s. The narrator could bear the grace of God in mind while making the narrative full of religious signification, and adding colors to the aura of the violent scene. However, an escape from the family massacre might be the very practical idea the old grandmother preserves. As to The Misfit, this mass killing does not bring him much joy but complex and contradictory feelings towards life and faith. His understanding is also different from that of the narrator’s and that of the grandmother’s.
complicated reasoning of mental rejection. However, the grandmother’s words and gesture might gradually turn to become a certain transcendental force that elevates his mental maturity beyond the superficial understanding and reasoning of faith and belief. The germination of this transformation is hidden within the ending conversation between The Misfit and Bobby Lee:
“Some fun!” Bobby Lee said.
“Shut up, Bobby Lee,’ The Misfit said. “It’s no real pleasure in life.” (363)
The Misfit tells the grandmother that his fun and pleasure in life is gained through his misdeeds and violence towards others. But now the anti-social behavior can no longer bring forth the fun that he previously confirmed. The violence done to the grandmother becomes a stain of sarcasm. He chastises the social injustice and adopts anti-social behaviors as his method of challenge and protest, but the death of the old grandmother repeats once more what he distains—the social injustice done to a person who claims to do nothing seriously wrong. And ironically the grandmother dies because she intends to include The Misfit as one of her breed and her outstretching hand expresses a gesture of compassion.
Starting from a family plan of a vacation in Florida, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” ends when the family is extinguished. The “supposed to be fun” detour from the highway turns out to be the road to death. None of the family would suspect that listening to the grandmother’s suggestion would come to such an end, though actually the grandmother’s words are seldom worthy of listening. The verbal violence occurred repeatedly but received no prohibition within the family mimics the physical violence of the real world that The Misfit and his henchmen resort to. Violence, in its various forms, can be found everywhere in the narrative and can only stop while its power emerges and its damage painfully acknowledged. The violence of words could only portray vaguely the virtual territory of human beings’
vicious thoughts towards each other; however, the violence of action claims the harvest of the hatred that has long been heading nowhere. The extinction of the Bailey family does not prove they are sinners, for they are merely in a bad luck to have the car accident, and then, it happens that The
Misfit and his men are the first to find them. Even the grandmother is not so much responsible for the death of the Bailey family. The setting of this plot foils the violence and transcends the vindictive malice into a certain kind of transformational process. Violence happens, but does not necessarily have a reason, and sometimes, violence does not incur more violence. The transformation moment occurs while a person can finally start out from breaking the mode of virtual existence, to enter his realization stage of existence.