Analysis Of Three Works Essay Research Paper — страница 2

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in it so dark and strange and full of a feeling we could not fathom that our jokes were hollow, and the trouble in our minds and in our hearts remained.” Like Rainsford, Spangler did not realize the danger or the evil intentions of Dick in time to tell anyone. When Randy and Spangler found a new rifle in Dick’s room. He sweet-talked them into keeping their mouths shut. Only after the damage had been done did they realize their mistake. “. . . we both stared there for a minute, aware now of the murderous significance of the secret we had kept, with a sudden sense of guilt and fear, as if somehow the crime lay on our shoulders.” Dick was caught in the end, and he paid for what he had done. But this act of brutal violence brought out the absolute animal in the people of the

town. To catch the beast, they became beasts themselves. They rioted, and refusing to listen to the mayor, they shattered the window of the gun shop, proceeded to steal all of the guns, and took off with a bloody roar, after the dogs in search of Dick. “The men on horseback reached him first. They rode up around him and discharged their guns into him. He fell forward in the snow, riddled with bullets. The men dismounted, turned him over on his back, and all the other men came in and riddled him. They took his lifeless body, put a rope around his neck and hung him to a tree. Then the mob exhausted all their ammunition on the riddled carcass.” In the process of eliminating Dick, the men of the town became just as barbaric and grotesque as he had been, perhaps even more so. On

recounting the event, one man proudly boasted, “He was dead before he hit the ground. We all shot him full of holes then . . . Why hell, yes . . . We must of put three hundred holes in him.” Spangler must have awakened to the fact that pure evil does exist, and in many, many forms. Similar to Spangler, the members of the Wormsley Common car-park gang were innocent at first. Then T. became the leader of the gang. The boys respected his authority and went along with T.’s plan to destroy a nearby house. Like Dick, they also saw something dark, almost menacing in T. “T. raised his eyes, as gray and disturbed as the drab August day. ‘We’ll pull it down,’ he said. ‘We’ll destroy it!’” “T. was giving his orders with decision: it was as though this plan had been

with him all his life. . . Eventually all of the boys became T’s workers. It seemed T’s goal in life was to destroy this house, and by using his friends, he was able to accomplish his goal. The real exposure to evil, however, was to the owner of the house, Old Misery. Suspecting nothing of T., Old Misery had let him into the house for a look around. He had not an inkling of an idea about the capabilities of T. and the gang. He didn’t even appear suspicious. Old Misery was tricked into the lav by an innocent-looking boy. He had positively no idea what he was dealing with. It wasn’t merely a boy, put a force all too powerful for him alone to fathom. “[Old Misery] felt dithery and confused and old?” After that he didn’t know what was going on. “After a while it

seemed to him that there were sounds in the silence – they were faint and came from the direction of his house . . . he thought of burglars – perhaps they had employed the boy as a scout, but why should burglars engage in what sounded more and more like a stealthy form of carpentry?” Old Misery spent the night in the loo, unaware of the dark cloud hovering about his house and it’s potential for destruction. Also too late, Old Misery encounters, but still does not fully realize, the evil lurking about and the chaos it has caused. In horrible wonder, he surveyed the damage. “He was wearing a gray blanket to which flakes of pastry adhered. He gave a sobbing cry. “My house,” he said. “Where’s my house?” In that instant, his wisdom gathered up over the years

wasn’t worth a dime; he became a scared little boy, the victim of his own ignorance, and a force he could not understand.