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When Tessie is chosen, she is quickly stoned to death by the other town people and her family. The village deems murder to be an acceptable tradition… until it is you who is chosen.
The reader of "The Most Dangerous Game" is also faced with the question of the acceptability of murder. In this story, the definition of murder is expanded to include the murder of hunted animals and murder as a means of self-defense. During the voyage on the way to hunt jaguar, Rainsford and, his hunting companion, Whitney discuss their sport of hunting:
"The best sport in the world," agreed Rainsford.
"For the hunter," amended Whitney. "Not for the jaguar."
"Don't talk rot, Whitney," said Rainsford. "You're a big-game hunter, not a philosopher. Who cares how a jaguar feels?"
"Perhaps the jaguar does," observed Whitney.
"Bah! They've no understanding."
"Even so, I rather think they understand one thing -- fear. The fear of pain and the fear of death."
Later in the story, Rainsford becomes the hunted. He falls from the ship and swims to an island inhibited by General Zaroff, a game hunter. General Zaroff engages Rainsford in a hunt with Rainford as the unwilling prey. Rainsford is now living out the conversation he had with Whitney: he is the jaguar....
General Zaroff hunts humans and Rainsford is his next prize. He claims the hunt for humans is much more satisfying because a human's fear of being killed is so great. Rainsford quickly learns that prey, at least of the human kind, do have feelings -- bewilderment, fear and revenge. Rainsford cleverly outsmarts General Zaroff and ultimately, Rainsford kills Zaroff in self-defense, the same rational that Zaroff used to explain the killing of a large Cape buffalo who had charged at him. Murder as self-defense was acceptable to both the main characters.
Both Shirley Jackson and Richard Connell questioned tradition as a rational for murder. For the town folks in "The Lottery," it was an unquestioned tradition to stone a resident to death. There is no explanation as to why this tradition existed, only that it was just something to be done on June 27th of every year. Similarly, the tradition of hunting was not to be questioned, man being the superior species had the right to kill. Each story shows that tradition cannot justify murder, however, Connell provides a means of self-defense for Rainsford, a knife, while Jackson provides an inadequate means of failed persuasion. While the authors both condemn tradition as a rational for murder, both allude to but never clearly say that murder can be justified as an act of self-defense.
Later in the story, Rainsford becomes the hunted for the pleasure and thrill of General Zaroff. Rainsford is force to kill Zaroff in self-defense. The contrast between killing prey for the sport of it and killing for the purpose of self-defense poses the question of is Rainsford's killing of Zaroff a justifiable reason for murder. Essay outline: 1. Introduction: Can murder be justified? 2. Does tradition justify the stoning in Shirley Jackson's
Lottery" and "The Most Dangerous Game" At first glance, the slow tension built up in Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" seems to mark the story as wholly distinct from the over-the-top adventure in Richard Connell's "The Most Dangerous Game," but closer examination reveals a number of points in which the two tales seem to engage in a shared discourse regarding the value of human life. "The Lottery" features an ostensibly civil
Thematic Development in "Young Goodman Brown" and "The Most Dangerous Game" While Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" and Richard Connell's "The Most Dangerous Game" both feature the same basic theme of good vs. evil, the additional themes that the author utilize in telling their stories serves to differentiate them in a significant way, so that Hawthorne's story suggests that evil can corrupt even a successful protagonist while Connell suggests that his protagonist
Goodman Brown/Lottery Literature is frequently employed as a device for social and political commentary. This is certainly true in Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown," and Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery." Both these stories darkly satirize the rigid social conventions that define small town American life. Even though they wrote about a century apart, Hawthorne and Jackson drew similar conclusions about American religious life and culture. Throughout his career, Nathaniel Hawthorne remained concerned
Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" and DH Lawrence's "The Rocking-Horse Winner," the desire of human beings to gain control over their existence with the use of rituals and 'magic' is in evidence. Use of ritual and superstition in "The Lottery and "The Rocking Horse Winner" In one story, magic is real, in the other it is not II. "The Lottery" Plot of sacrifice Sacrifice highly ritualized Not performing the magic is seen as barbaric, ironically "The
setting of a story can reveal important things about the narrative's larger meaning, because the setting implies certain things about the characters, context, and themes that would otherwise remain implicit or undiscussed. In their short stories "The Lottery" and "The Rocking-Horse Winner," Shirley Jackson and DH Lawrence use particular settings in order to comment on the political and socio-economic status of their characters without inserting any explicitly political or