How do Mrs. Turpin and Claude from Flannery O'Connor's "Revelation" compare and contrast with the Grandmother and The Misfit from "A Good Man is...

Similarities and differences exist between many characters
in Flannery O’Connor’s stories, including between Claude and Mrs. Turpin in “Revelation”
and the grandmother and The Misfit in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.”  In the case of
these two stories, however, the differences seem perhaps more significant than the
similarities.

• Claude and The Misfit have very
  little in common.  Claude is a good-natured, passive man who seems totally dominated by
  his overbearing wife.  The Misfit, on the other hand, is a genuinely evil murderer who
  seems dominated by no one.


• The grandmother is
  manipulative, self-centered, and hypocritical, but she is a saint compared to Mrs.
  Turpin.


• The grandmother is afflicted by pride, as
  everyone is (at least from O’Connor’s perspective), but Mrs. Turpin is almost literally
  sick with pride, as her imaginary conversations with Jesus show – conversations in which
  she is obsessed with feelings of superiority.


• The
  grandmother uses the “n-word” casually, less because she is a vehement racist than
  because such language was typical of people of her age and background. Mrs. Turpin,
  however, seems far more consciously and deliberately racist than the grandmother.
  


• Mrs. Turpin is, quite literally, a more “hateful” person
  than the grandmother.  The grandmother is, after all, quite capable of making loving
  gestures, as she shows at the very end of the story but as she also demonstrates
  earlier:

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The grandmother offered to hold the baby and the
children’s mother passed him over the front seat to her.  She set him on her knee and
bounced him and told him about things they were passing. She rolled her eyes and screwed
up her mouth and stuck her leathery thin face into his smooth bland one. Occasionally he
gave her a faraway
smile.

Mrs. Turpin feels some
genuine affection for Claude, but in general she spends much of the story merely finding
fault with others.

• The grandmother’s life is
  transformed in an instant – in the instant when she reaches out and touches The Misfit
  in a gesture of love and compassion and is immediately shot as a result.  Mrs. Turpin,
  however, has most of the story to contemplate the “revelation” she receives when Mary
  Grace literally throws the book at her (a book titled Human
  Development). By the end of the story, when Mrs. Turpin receives an even
  greater and more profound revelation, she is given the chance to act on this new insight
  because she is still alive.  However, although the grandmother is physically dead by the
  end of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” her own revelation and her response to it may
  already have secured her a place in heaven, as O’Connor perhaps suggests when she writes
  that the grandmother's legs were “crossed under her like a child’s and her face [was]
  smiling up at the cloudless sky.”


• Interestingly, both
  women, at the ends of the two stories, are looking up into the sky, although the
  grandmother is physically dead, while Mrs. Turpin has the opportunity, thanks to her
  revelation, to live a richer, fuller, better life if she responds to her revelation as
  one hopes she will.