The author begins the story with a casual family weekend trip, haphazardly planned. A fair amount of foreshadowing portends a bad ending, which is shortly delivered (within a few pages) with the untimely demise of an entire family. The story is told almost entirely from the perspective of the grandmother, with her "settling herself in comfortably" and revealing things about her thoughts that we can't see from the other characters.
The character is an unreliable witness to events. She forgets things, and spends the majority of the trip reminiscing about the past, and not focused on the present. Every chance she gets, she talks to someone of the past. When she meets Red Sammy, she embarks on a conversation about the lack of trust in society and how it's the Europeans fault. Interestingly, she makes several generalizations of the poor black community as well. The dialog between grandmother and the Misfit outlines a lot about the selfish nature of her character. It's interesting that during the entire conversation, the grandmother didn't plead once for the survival of anyone else in her family. While her entire family is getting slaughtered, she is bargaining for her own life (or trying to bring the Misfit to god, but probably the former).
The Misfit was surprisingly real for as two-dimensional as he was. He was definitely the villain, and stayed the villain, but the author managed to give, through the relationship with the grandmother, a little hope that maybe he wasn't all bad (even while the rest of the family was being killed). This is something I will take away from the story - sometimes a relationship, even with someone as seemingly obtuse and selfish as the grandmother was, developed between the reader and a character can help to breath life into other characters as well.
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