Killing Daniel

Mankind is, by nature, an evil, vile, and savage species. This is nowhere more apparent than in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, a novel detailing the adventures of a group of shipwrecked British schoolboys, who must survive on an uncharted Pacific island, while seeking rescue and order. Golding’s exploration of Man’s inherent wickedness is no more apparent in Chapter Nine, “A View to a Death”, in which the group of boys, in a riotous ceremony, brutally murder one of their own. The many events of the book lead to one conclusion: In Lord of the Flies, William Golding propagates the idea that Mankind is inherently inclined towards savagery and evil, which is conveyed via symbolism, juxtaposition, and foreshadowing.

Killing Kennedy is a historical nonfiction book written by Bill O’Reilly, the anchor of the O’Reilly Factor on Fox News Channel and an author by the name of Martin Dugard. Bill O’Reilly has a reputation for presenting world events in a “fair and balanced” manner. This work is no exception. Killing Kennedy illustrates the United States 35th President, John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s life, presidency, and death in a way that makes the reader not want to stop turning the pages. O’Reilly made a presidential assassination into a human-interest story. Killing Kennedy brought little pieces of history that I’ve learned throughout the course of my education and put them all into perspective.

The deranged, but brilliant Edgar Allan Poe once said “The scariest monsters are the ones that lurk within our souls...” Poe’s notions of the evil within are found in both “The Cask Of Amontillado” by Poe, and “A Poison Tree” by William Blake. The authors write about how revenge can create this insane creature within that will only settle for betrayal and destruction. For example, the speakers in both features are wronged by someone and their way of handling it is deceitful murder. The killers on the outside are characterized as calm people; while on the inside, they are characterized truly as people who enjoy watching those who “deserve it” suffer. Poe and Blake use characterization to convey a theme that man takes violent revenge when they are wronged.

One’s behaviour can have an substantial impact on a society's outcome. There is a common notion that humans are nurtured to be peaceful and civil. However this belief is contradicted by the action of the boys, in William Golding’s, “Lord of the Flies”. A group of schoolboys are abruptly thrown out of their controlled and civil circumstances into an inhabited tropical island in the middle of the Pacific. The novel is Golding’s attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature, by using symbolism to delineate this theme. Golding’s extensive use of symbolism, such as the conch, the signal fire and the painted faces helps demonstrates the defects of society. These symbols are used by Golding to illuminate the subsequent effects on the boys’ behaviour, which undoubtedly illustrates the defects of human nature on society.

Regardless of its fictional nature of the novel, it conveys realistic issues that reflects values and attitudes within our existing world. Within Craig Silvey’s coming-of-age novel, Jasper Jones, is set in a fictional rural town named Corrigan within the context located in Western Australia during the 1960’s. Japer Jones takes the readers through a mysterious journey where two teenagers, Charlie Bucktin and Jasper Jones, who discovered the scene of Laura Wishart’s suicide and they attempt to fill the puzzle pieces in to the mystery of her death. Silvey expertly utilised narrative conventions such as point of view and characterisation to criticise various of flaws within our communities: such as scapegoating, police brutality, and prejudice.

In our society, people are often cruel to one another in the want for personal gain, but this is restrained to mere social interactions and online in our industrial world. However, when we are separated from civilized society and the pressures that it places upon us, we are quick to turn to savage, cruel behavior to survive. Golding understood this idea, that we are only civilized when others are watching, and showed the possibility for even the purest to become affected by societal pressures in his novel, the Lord of the Flies. In order to show the role of cruelty in shaping the novel Lord of the Flies, Golding uses character archetypes, the idea of cosmic irony, and extended symbolism to highlight the inherent flaws of human nature and the potential for even the purest individuals to turn to cruel ways due to societal pressures.

Many people in North Carolina are outraged after a police officer killed a deaf man. The man, whose name was Daniel Kevin Harris, was driving on the freeway when an officer attempted to pull him over for speeding. Daniel did not know that the officer was trying to pull him over, and he continued driving. The officer followed Daniel to his home and shot him.

Everyday an individual encounters an act of cruelty, whether it is physically, emotionally, or verbally. On the other hand, there are those who inflict harm intentionally or unintentionally on others as a result of being dissatisfied emotionally or psychologically. Such individuals become labeled either to be good or bad by society. However, a person as a whole cannot be good or bad; it is their actions that are vile. Similarly, in “The Possibility of Evil” by Shirley Jackson, Miss Strangeworth reveals her cruelty through writing letters while, in “The Snake” by Ervin D Krause, the uncle shows his cruelty through his behaviour towards the boy. Thus, all individuals expose their cruelty through their immoral actions.

In doing so, he portrays loss of innocence through war by way of Rodwell’s ordeal and eventual suicide. However, it is important to note that the innocence lost is not only Rodwell’s, but that of other soldiers as well. In Part Three of The Wars, the narrator of the story notes that “Some of them were madmen. This was understandable, perhaps… Rodwell, being Rodwell, had tried to stop them… Half an hour later, Rodwell wandered into No Man’s Land and put a bullet through his ears” (Findley 135). Because of the war, these men have been damaged beyond repair and reduced to a primal urge to kill, taking their instinct out on helpless animals. Rodwell, in his innocence, tries to stop them, but, upon witnessing the senseless death of an animal at their hands, is entirely disillusioned. The realization that men not only disrespect life, but actively eradicate it, is too overwhelming - it rips him from his idealistic views. Unable to cope, he goes against all he believes in and, in committing suicide, destroys life himself.Thus, by causing humans to act irrationally and out of instinct as a result of war, Findley again makes loss of innocence a huge factor in its toll on humanity. Even though senseless cruelty is a recurring theme in war, Rodwell is unable to come to terms with this. He goes from believing that “[Humans] survive in each other. Everything lives forever. Nothing dies”

Literature is the window to realizing the negatives of society and how destructive certain norms can be. Readers are brought into a completely different story than their own, but by using similar issues in today’s world, the readers can actually learn from the story and its overall message. All writers write for a purpose, whether it’s for a new meaning to life, to live a different life than our own, or to impact others on an emotional level by teaching them to see the importance of the little things. As a reader, you search for pieces of literature that interest you whether you find the story like your own, or wish you lived the life in the story. By using issues in today’s within their works, authors are able to grab the reader's attention long enough for them to get across what they wanted to get across. Often in many works of literature, writers use societal issues as their basis for the work’s themes and symbols. By doing so, this allows the reader to question the morality behind social norms and how impactful certain ideals can be in people’s lives.

Although Perry’s retelling is embellished with relatable stories pointing to peer pressure, insecurity, and other classic human struggles as being the reasoning behind the murder. These ideas are displayed through diction and imagery; therefore solidifying the theme that evil is often not sinister, but an extreme, yet human, response to struggle and despair.

Although humankind attempts its best at preventing evil actions, eventually evil rises above all else. While humans are living ordinary lives and living in ignorance, evil is always scheming and waiting to slide up behind the turned backs of society as depicted in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. One could argue that this is not the case and that good deeds always overshadow evil and that evil is just an occasional blip. However, what one’s opinion of society does not outshine the cold hard facts of humankind’s natural tendencies; specifically, how things are never as they seem, how easily humans can betray their emotions and how humans choose to ignore difficult situations in the search for an easy

Society thrives on pillars of morality, which could only be attainable from the people that thrive within it. Not all individuals appeal to morality. Some are born with predominantly immoral character traits. Due to this, they display various questionable behaviors that collectively lead up to the decline of the society and its values. All in all, multiple factors contribute to the decaying of community, one of which is violence. Violence takes up different forms, which primarily simulate a criminal nature. The vice has become so prevalent in society that creators of literature art pieces find it hard to resist incorporating concepts of violence in their work. In both The Cask of Amontillado and Trifles, the ability of violence to stand out as the central conflict proves the role that it plays in destroying the society.

As the era of literature slowly declines, the expert critiques and praise for literature are lost. Previously, novels were bursting at the seams with metaphors, symbolism, and themes. In current times, “novels” are simply short stories that have been elaborated on with basic plot elements that attempt to make the story more interesting. Instead of having expert critical analysis written about them, they will, most likely, never see that, as recent novels have nothing to analyze. Even books are beginning to collect dust, hidden away and forgotten, attributing to the rise of companies such as Spark Notes. An author deserves to have his work praised, no matter how meager and the masses should have the right to embrace it or to reject it. As

Evil also personifies the earth with these conations stating that the once kind “earth turns evil”. Together with grief’s taste this helps the reader to visualise even more clearly the future earth which Wright imagines. From the picture that she has developed inside the reader’s head Wright hopes for them to get a better understanding and a greater concern for the consequences that follow a lack of environmental attention.