The House Of The Scorpion: An Analysis

“I believe that the root of all evil is power,” (Patricia Cornwell). I think this quote says a lot about the power of power. Let’s think about some people who were incredibly evil. Hitler killed 11 million people (Schwartz), 49 million deaths were linked to Joseph Stalin (Ghosh), and Kim Jong-Un has executed 70 officials since coming into office in 2011 (Omara). That doesn’t even include all of the other people who have died because of him or who will die because of him in the future. What do all of these people have in common? Power. If none of these people had power, millions of lives could have been saved. But with all power comes evil, as proven by these three horrible people. Now, power may not be taken to this extent all the time. As

In the story, The House of the Scorpion, written by Nancy Farmer, the main characters are Matt, El Patron, Celia, and Tam Lin. The main setting is the future in Mexico. In the beginning of the story, Matt realizes he is a clone. The main problem is nobody likes Matt because he a clone and not an actual human being. The solution is Matt is the actual El Patron since he died. At the end of the he is now the ruler of Opium and people now respect Matt as their ruler.

     Personal power has the ability to be essential to greatness, and at the same time is able to destroy a person’s nature. In the drama Macbeth by William Shakespeare, the main character, Macbeth, becomes corrupt through power that he gains. The play shows that even someone who starts out like Macbeth and does not crave power, will do terrible things to gain authority and power.

These two structures are controlled by different intangible themes. The first is ‘good/bad’ in terms of master morality and the second is ‘evil/good’ in terms of the slave morality. Noble classes and races, according to Nietzsche, started by defining their actions, themselves and their way of life as ‘good’, while ‘bad’ simply referred to anything that was not noble – “everything lowly, low-minded, common and plebeian” (OGM, Sec. I.2). In contrast, the morality of slaves discusses a position of weakness rather than strength. It starts by redefining the masters’ values as ‘evil’, while ‘good’ refers to anything opposed to that of ‘evil’. Unable to create their own original values, the slaves instead invert the values of their masters. This makes the master morality affirmative and favorable, while the slave morality is reactant and adverse. Deleuze, in an interpretation of Nietzsche, summarizes these two positions as a constrasting formula: where the master’s saying is “I am good, so that means you are bad”, while the slave’s logic is that of ‘ressentiment’: “You are evil, so that means I am good.”

In the story, “The House of the Scorpion”, written by Nancy Farmer, the main character is named Matt. The story takes place in the future around Mexico in a city named Opium. The main problem in the book is Matt is a clone and people do not like clones because clones act weird because they have an injection when they are first made that corrupts their body and makes them do things that humans don’t normally do. But Matt is different, he didn’t get the injection but people still think he is like the other clones, disgusting and brain-dead. The problem is solved when everyone is at a party for an old man named El Patron. He died and is having a party thrown in memory of him and El Patron left a note that told everyone to drink a certain wine but the wine was poisoned. Everyone died except for Matt, his “mother” Celia, his friend Maria, and a few others. Everyone is dead so the few that survived decide to start a new life where no one knows who they really are.

Power corrupts other aspects of human life as well, as outlined in The House of the Scorpion. One could state that the power associated with the “will of the people” corrupted Aztlan in a way. The boys of the plankton factory had little power, and if they obeyed the Keepers’ demands, they would gain power for themselves. Therefore, the boys gave up freedom and opinions in order to please the Keepers, so that they could become more powerful. Once such example of this is Ton-Ton. The story states, “Ton-Ton had shown himself eager to obey. He humbled himself whenever the Keepers asked” (Farmer 301). Chacho describes Ton-Ton as extremely eager to please the Keepers and as one who does exactly as they say, even if it means being very cruel to Matt

Any person could say in one point of their life they have wanted power and authority. In Macbeth, by William Shakespeare, the tragedy starts off with a loyal subject named Macbeth who is crowned Thane of Cawdor. Once Macbeth was crowned Thane, he wanted something greater, something superior, and to do that he had come up with the idea to kill, even though he was fearful of being caught. The most superior person that everyone was loyal too and loved the king. Macbeths want for that power is later turned into corruption. The corruption of power inside Macbeth turns his loyal side to a cruel,darker, and malicious side. The desire for power can corrupt loay subjects by relying on fear to maintain one’s position. In Macbeth, our protagonist, at

Nancy Farmer’s “The House of the Scorpion” demonstrates how the alternative anti-utopian reality may look like. Its central figure, the clone Matt, faces the obstacles and challenges on the way to approaching identity thanks to the society’s atrocities as a consequence of considering him to be an animal. He achieves the significant results in the course of thinking’s development that assists in his acquiring independence from the prejudiced system. Still, in spite of the successful separating far away from the idea of imitating the original’s pattern, the character of Matt does nothing for improving the existing contradictions and unfairnesses as if he were an unthinking copy with no chances for advancement.

The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer Fascinating and insightful, Nancy Farmer’s book The House of the Scorpion holds the power to captivate any audience with the tale of a young boy named Matteo Alacran. Being a clone, Matteo, called Matt, faces many perilous and persistent challenges that force him to change the way he thinks and acts. Affected immensely by the other characters in the story, Matt learns that not everyone gets what they deserve.

Nietzsche does not dispute the influence that Socrates has imposed on the world. Rather, Nietzsche disputes the philosophy that he has imposed on the world, believing it to be detrimental to humankind. In this paper, I argue that Nietzsche finds Socrates and his philosophy to be life-negating and causal of decline, while any form of existence should be life-affirming and empowering, though such a form has yet to exist in the modern era. In order to prove this, I will first examine his critique of Socrates, demonstrating that Socrates, as an individual, belonged to the lowest level of society in Athens as a consequence of his repulsive figure, and therefore, created his philosophy not with the intent of enlightenment, but as a ressentiment (i.e. resentment) towards the Athenian aristocracy. Second, I will examine

‘House of the Scorpion’ is a science-fiction book written by Nancy Farmer in 2002. This book takes place in Opium in the future; the content of the book is about a boy named Matt, experiencing difficult situations trying to find the solution. To be accurate, the content of this book is about Matt, a cloned boy experiencing hard situations and solving these situations with his allies. Most of the situations of Matt’s experiences talk about people around him noticing that Matt is a clone of El Patron, the “boss” or the ruler of the Big House and being mean to him. However, if Matt wasn’t El patron’s clone and he was a clone of someone else, the people in the Big House would have been crueler and more mean to Matt. In this book, people used cloning to transplant needed organs like Mr.Macgregor and also El Patron. They wanted to transplant a heart from Matt to El Patron. Cloning is the theme of this book and how Matt solves these hard situations that are around him by being a clone.

“As soon as a religion comes to dominate it has as its opponents all those who would have been its first disciples.” Nietzsche was one of the first modern philosophers to rebel against rationalism and when World War I came about, the revolution against religion truly became a legitimate statement. Friedrich Nietzsche strongly believed that many of those that practiced religion were led to the acceptance of slave morality. Religion had always played a fundamental role in society as it sets strict boundaries and standards of what is morally correct and incorrect. However, Nietzsche claims that, “Human nature is always driven by “ ‘the will to power’ ”, but religion will tell one otherwise, saying that one should forbid their bad desires. In Nietzsche’s

In Nietzsche’s aphorisms 90-95 and 146-162 he attacks what he believes to be the fundamental basis of the “slave” morality prevalent in the Judeo-Christian tradition as well as other religions and societies. From the beginning, he distinguishes the two different types of moralities he believes to exist: the “master morality”, created by rulers of societies, and the “slave” morality, created by the lowest people in societies. The former stresses virtues of the strong and noble while looking down upon the weak and cowardly. This type of morality, however, is not as widespread as the “slave morality” that has been adopted by so many religions. Nietzsche looks through the psychology and logic of

For Nietzsche, “the slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of natures that are denied the true reaction, that of deeds, and compensate themselves with an imaginary revenge.” (Nietzsche 913). This imaginary revenge causes the complete reversal in defining words of class. The resentful slaves and priests looked up at the nobility with anger, characterizing them as selfish, corrupted, abusive and tyrannical, among other things. Ultimately, they came to the conclusion that the nobility were the pinnacle of evil. In doing so, “he has conceived ‘the evil enemy,’ ‘the Evil One,’ and this in fact is his basic concept, from which he then evolves, as an afterthought and pendant, a ‘good one’—himself!” (Nietzsche 915). Through the venomous eye of ressentiment, the slave class has characterized the good men, those with strong moral character as evil, and in doing so, has

5. Discuss Nietzsche’s theory of “will to power” and “the innocence of becoming”. Does the hypothesis of the will to power successfully “debunk” traditional religion, morality, and philosophical claims to provide the “disinterested” or “objective” truth?