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Pure Evil In Gibran's On Good And Evil

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In the world today, there have been many tragic occurrences that can be considered as pure evil. One example is the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting. On Wednesday February 14th, 2018 Nikolas Cruz was charged with seventeen counts of premeditated murder. Cruz, a former student of Stoneman Douglas, shot and killed seventeen and wounded countless others without any provocation or reason. Even with hindsight, one cannot come up with any conceivable reason or rationale for his action. Most of these students have probably never met him in person, let alone caused him any harm or slight. As a result, William Golding would state that Nikolas Cruz is an innately evil person. He killed simply for the sake of killing. Conversely, Gibran, who is …show more content…

In the poem, “On Good and Evil,” Gibran argues that goodness lives within each person. Throughout the poem, Gibran presents several different examples, such as “You are good in countless ways,” (Gibran 26) and “You are good when you strive to give of yourself.” (Gibran 10). In both of these examples, he was taking the readers to a personal level, to draw his point across that goodness resides within everyone. He seemed to argue that evil was a byproduct of circumstances; it was always created by other factors; it was never “always there” as opposed to “good.” In one of the first lines of the poems Gibran says, “For what is evil but good tortured by its own hunger and thirst? Verily when good is hungry it seeks food even in dark caves, and when it thirsts it drinks even of dead waters.” (Gibran 3-4). He manipulates personification, “when good is hungry it seeks food even in dark caves” to represent the idea that evil was formed when “good” changed by external forces or by necessity. For these reasons, he also made it clear that we, the readers, have to work to maintain our inherent goodness. In other words, good will eventually turn into evil if we don’t pay attention to our environment or to allow injustice to flourish around us. For instance, in the last line of the poem, Gibran ends the poem with “For the truly good ask not the naked, "Where is your garment?" nor the houseless, "What has befallen your house?" (Gibran 37-38 ). By ending his poem with an analogy, Gibran is trying to leave a strong impression on us by questioning if we the readers are “good people.” He bluntly states, “for truly good people ask not, "Where is your garment?" ” essentially saying that good people don’t ask questions, but rather act on

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