Greed Vs. Annoyance In William Gay's 'The Paperhanger'

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Greed vs. Annoyance On the one hand innocence is murdered due to greed, and on the other hand innocence is murdered due to annoyance. In E. L. Doctorow’s “A House on the Plains”, the lives of innocent people are taken by Dora and her son Earle due to greed and the need for money. In William Gay’s “The Paperhanger”, the paperhanger kills the child, Zeineb, because she was annoying him. In both stories innocent people are murdered for no reason. In Doctorow’s story Dora and Earle are both blinded by greed and money. They like to find rich people and murder them and then run away with their money. In “A House on the Plains”, Dora and Earle would murder all of Dora’s past husbands and then run away with the insurance money. They then run away and move to a …show more content…

He is annoyed by the doctor’s wife because ‘she had been quarreling with the paperhanger’ (343). The wife is fighting with the paperhanger because of the confusion between double-bolt rolls and single-bolt rolls. The cause of the paperhanger’s anger is partially due to Zenieb as well. Zenieb likes to play with the paperhanger’s ‘shoulder length hair. Zenieb is delighted when she runs her finger’s through his hair’ (343). The other reason that the paperhanger was annoyed at Zenieb was because she ‘stuck her tongue out at him’ (360) when she saw her mom was annoyed at the paperhanger. The paperhanger mentions in the story that he had killed his wife in the past because she was cheating on him with her supervisor. He says that it wasn’t an ‘impetuous spur-of-the-moment thing. He had thought it all out’ (358) beforehand. The paperhanger ‘snaked his hand out like a serpent and closed on her throat and snapped her neck’ (360). He killed an innocent child due to his anger at the quarrel between him and the doctor’s wife, and because of a childish act by a 4-year-old

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