Carol Dell Amico's The Beast In The Jungle

Since Homo-erectus appeared in the African continent over a million years ago humans have evolved from beasts into men and women that are capable of advanced thought processing and complex ideas. Part of this evolution has been the creation of that supersede the corporeal such as good and evil, morality, and love; likewise, as proposed by psychologist Abraham Maslow humans evolved from requiring simple basic needs to seeking self-fulfillment and finding a purpose. In the short story The Beast in the Jungle by Henry James the reader is able to witness this quest for a greater purpose in a proverbial like tale or what Carol Dell'Amico calls, “the story's fable-like quality”. To convey the moral and theme of the story, the necessity to live in

From the use of naming and setting in irony to the use of light as a showcase of the characters sanity and state of mind the author is able to employ imagery to its full extent to truly emit the message of carpe diem to the readers. To start we can see the use of seasonal imagery from the first paragraph when the protagonist is first mentioned, John Marcher, his name not by coincidence closely resembling the month of March. In the second paragraph we are able to see this again with the apparent deuterogamist or sidekick of the story, “It led, briefly, in the course of the October afternoon, to his closer meeting with May Bartram, whose face…It affected him as the sequel of

As seen in, “She took this in, but the light in her eyes continued for him not to be that of mockery”, ( James 509) Marcher uses May as a beacon of light as a contraposition to his overhanging beast casting a shadow on him. This is once again later when John states, “you give me no more light on it, you abandon me.”, showcasing himself in the dark and reaching out to May as his light. In this we view how May has seen the “beast”, the lack of loving and enjoying the present, and is afraid that John will only see it after it’s too late. Her statements of, “I see what you think…You’ve been right…The door isn’t shut. The door is open…It’s never too late.” (James 700), are all examples of May’s attempts to bring Marcher out of the darkness and into the light in examples of foreshadowing and possible dramatic irony. Raymond Benoit points out, “Marcher exemplifies someone who, on a psychological level, loses his life, and certainly May's: on a philosophical level, he degrades appearance and exalts idea (doubly tragic as an instinctive image: the beast in the jungle) to a suprasensory realm (the future unique).”, another example of dramatic irony in how the reader can be witness to a reality that neither May nor John can, the fact that May has also become lost in