The Benefit Of Ourselves

4 Pages 1119 Words

ESSAY QUESTION
2. Darkness. Much literature is concerned with dispelling our complacency about our lot—our self assurance, our belief in the triumph of goodness and light. Choose three works and show how the authors make us confront the dark side of our nature.
Works I choose: Midsummer Nights Dream, Brave New World, Heart of Darkness, Shooting an elephant, Mark of the Beast.


THE BENEFIT OF OURSELVES

We humans have the tendency to lie for our own benefit, the legacy that our past has left us. Nowadays we are more related with the evil than with good. Evil has been forever and will remain that way, and it has been present in the most peculiar places. Even in the powers of good, evil has gone through. Evil is best described as causing ruin, injury, or pain. In Heart of Darkness, the dark side is imperialism which tries to make the tribes do what they think is correct. In A Midsummer Nights Dream, the dark side is the society that wont allow their own sons to get married and that is why they runaway to the forest. I also think that the society won’t accept different marriages of different social status. In Shooting an Elephant, the dark side is when the shooter, Orwell lies within a conflict of what to do either to shoot the elephant and earn a little respect from the crowd or don’t do anything at all.
In Heart of Darkness we are constantly exposed to the dark side of human beings sometimes in a low degree and others in the must “inhuman” shade but with this novel we can see that darkness is only found in ourselves. First we see that Kurtz a criminal has lost himself in power. He is a corrupt human being who tries to use progress as a disguise. He makes everyone believe that his is only exploiting the people of Congo for their own benefit, so they can become “civilized.” But truly, the only reason he is being such an animal is to benefit him self and no one else, he gets so lost in his own perversity and evil...