One of the most important quotes regarding the grandmother’s mentality is the line before her last words. Up until the final scene, her ulterior motives when misdirecting the family and emphasizing her injuries were explicitly written in the text, but in the encounter with The Misfit, there is no explicit description of the grandmother’s internal thoughts. A “boy who cried wolf” situation is left in the absence of concrete evidence for what the grandmother is feeling, where the reader could arrive at multiple conclusions. It is possible the grandmother genuinely saw a shared humanity between her and The Misfit when she tells him he is one of her children, but it is also possible she was continuing her pattern of saying whatever serves her self-interest to save herself despite the obvious death of her family. After each of the family members had been taken to be killed, The Misfit's conversation with the grandmother continued, with her trying desperately to convince The Misfit that he could fit into her moral system as a good man. In trying to do this, her moral system begins to fall apart, and she even begins doubting Jesus. As The Misfit laments not being able to know the truth about Jesus, the grandmother’s head “cleared for an instant. She saw the man’s face twisted close to her own as if he were going to cry and she murmured, “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!” (O'Connor 13). By beginning her last line of dialogue with this, O’Connor emphasized the intentionality of what the grandmother says, whether the clarity was used to focus her ability to manipulate The Misfit into sparing her or speak a deep realization of their connectedness remains unclear. Either way, there was a finality to the statement that is meant to encapsulate something integral to the grandmother’s character, and her death following moments after speaking those words speaks to the deeply gothic nature of the story.