"A Good Man is Hard to Find" by Flannery O'Connor in American Short Story Masterpieces (Reading Response)

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I find it interesting that the father hardly says anything in this story.  When he does say something, it's angry, like "will you all shut up!"  The mother says even less than he does, which doesn't allow readers to get to know her character at all.  At least with her husband, we know that he's hostile.  The children are written to be brats; the little girl rudely says "I wouldn't live in a broken-down place like this for a million bucks!" as a response to the waitress wanting to keep the child.  When asked what he would do if The Misfit caught him, the brother responds "I'd smack his face," like a smart-aleck character that is very hard to like.  The grandmother is one of the most unlikable characters of the story, as she carelessly speaks racial slurs in front of her grandchildren, annoyingly brings her cat on the trip, which eventually gets out of its cage and causes the car to turn over, and finally, she identifies The Misfit, which is the action the ultimately causes the whole family's death.  It seems that Flannery O'Connor makes these characters as easy to hate as possible, perhaps to soften the blow when they all die.  Well, this technique does not work for me, as I was still devastated each time I read about the next "pistol report."  As unlikable as the characters are, I still wanted them to find a way out of danger; even when I read the first two characters being shot, I was still hoping that the others would be able to escape, or that maybe The Misfit would let them go.  Even though The Misfit was mentioned a couple times throughout the story, I still did not expect for him to encounter the family, let alone kill them.  O'Connor has some great examples in "A Good Man is Hard to Find" of how to write a terribly devastating story.