human nature illustrated by wolfe s the kid by

American Literature, Fiction

Muscles tensed, nostrils flare leg, the beautiful feline creature eye its soon-to-be prey, a harmless bobcat drinking from your watering hole. With out a moment of hesitation, the black and fruit striped tiger breaks away into a full stride and pounces in its sufferer, tearing the defenseless bobcat to weakling shreds using its razor sharp teeth, and highly effective bone mashing bite. This kind of tiger, sleeping at the top of the pet food string, is a seasoned predator. Thomas Wolfe’s “The Child simply by Tiger, ” set in the Deep Southern region in the early 1930s, details the deceptive nature of mankind, contemplating the existence of an inner “tiger” in all people. The story begins with the narrator reflecting in African American Dick Prosser’s rampage, twenty-five years after the event occurs. The storyline reveals, through the exemplary case of Dick, that hostile social conditions can ignorantly drive males and females to commit unfathomable crimes that unleash their interior “tigers. “

Dick confronts constant difficulty due to his racist interpersonal environment, which usually slowly causes his interior tiger to surface. A motif of “darkness” appears in the last section (Wolfe 657). Indeed, this motif reveals that Dick has usually had a dark passenger, or an inner tiger. Dick, a “token of the other aspect of male’s dark soul, ” is known as a staunch manifestation of a critical evil, the evil that develops from the mere experience of life. This kind of evil, which will plagues most who encounter life, is embedded and so deeply in to Dick’s “soul” in particular, that he literally becomes a “token, ” or a tangible representation of this evil (657). Nevertheless , Dick’s malicious nature does not become apparent to all until he is forced too far by simply his social context, triggering him to unleash his “unknown demon, ” simply by committing horrific and satanic evils, namely murder. Furthermore, the duplication of “silence” in the initially paragraph, infers that Dick originally attempts to silence his emerging inner evil. His efforts, however , are fruitless, as he in the end embraces his animalistic and natural “demon, ” succumbing to the bad that grows out of his tough experiences anytime.

The location, with its deep-seated racism, unconsciously pushes Dick to his breaking stage. Throughout the narrative there is a repeating of “mystery” surrounding Dick and the reasons for his rampage. The community people truly believe the purpose for Dick’s rampage to become a “mystery, ” illustrated by the repetition of the word, nevertheless , from an outdoor perspective, it is quite evident the discriminative procedures of the community pushed him to these extreme conditions. “No a single ever knew” why Dick snapped (656). The community associates at the time had been clearly unware of how racism, which was common in their contemporary society, formed a harsh social environment for African-Americans, including Dick. It remained a “wonder” just how their own negative treatment of Dick could drive him into a murderous rampage (656).

In truth, the community does not actually see their treatment of Dick and other African-Americans as “derogatory, ” somewhat their hurtful beliefs were so significant that they experienced their remedying of African-Americans as less-than-humans was fair and deserved. These types of racist philosophy of the contemporary society are also perpetuated by a mob mentality that may be evident in the community, because individuals are afraid to speak away against the racism, scared of talking out up against the mainstream idea of the “mob. ” The town’s racism ultimately causes Dick launches his interior tiger in the attack on the town because of the terrible social conditions he experienced, mainly the racism from the members from the town.

Dick’s condition provides an sort of how a discriminative social context can drive men and women to commit heinous acts of terror, to discharge their internal “tiger, ” or predator. Dick constantly faces adversity in a bigoted society which in turn actively works against him. This hardship even forces him to extreme procedures, particularly when he unleashes his ever-present inner darkness with an entire city in the form of a mass murder. The townspeople unsuspectingly cause Dick’s evil to surface, they can be, in a certain sense, responsible for his rampage on the town. Thus, Dick is usually not for a tiger great feasts on a undamaging antelope. Somewhat, Dick is actually a tiger great feasts on an complete society filled with tigers, in whose inner night manifests by itself in the terrible atrocity of racism. Probably the point can be more commonly applied to culture as a collective whole: appearances can be deceiving. The existence of the tiger can be ubiquitous, every single human holds around this gambling, like a dark passenger grounded in secrecy, cloaked within a veil of disguise.