On the Cannibals by Michel de Montaigne

1683 Words4 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Montaigne, “On Cannibals”

In Montaigne’s essay On the Cannibals, the critical analysis of European and Brazilian societies through the scope of the “other” establishes the distinction between the two worlds. However, the definitions of “self” and “other” quickly become blurred as Montaigne connected more synonymous aspects in governance and functioning of the two groups of people. By labeling the outsiders as the “self” and accepting their formalities as the norm, he undermines the Europeans as the “other” and uses the Barbarians to examine the civilized with an untainted perspective, enabling close scrutiny and analysis of both societies. It is through this definition that Montaigne is initially able to offer criticism of the ignorance of European arrogance and assumed superiority over the Barbarians. Montaigne concludes that the civilized and uncivilized both possess aspects that deviate from the idealized state of purity of Nature. The Europeans are far more corrupted but upon further introspection, the Cannibals are evolving towards the same nature of developing a more inorganic society. Therefore, the definition of the “self” offers a more profound understanding of the Barbarians and dismisses the importance of Montaigne’s society while stating the inevitability of transitioning to a more developed culture like the Europeans by the Barbarians.
The “stranger” as defined by Montaigne’s essay is the Europeans who ignorantly consider their society to be the center and apex. To the cannibalistic natives who operate a society that is much more primitive than the Europeans and who are concerned with the mere rudimentary aspects of life, the European society is peculiar. The Europeans “consent to obey a boy” (p.240) and have extreme social injustice where “...

... middle of paper ...

...er” becomes the Barbarians. If the strangers were the Cannibals, then the status quo of the French society is preserved and the cannibalistic behaviors of the foreigners become unconventional. This is assuming the belief that the Europeans are the norm. By identifying the “self” and the “other”, he first sets the differences between the two and then blurs them to state that the universal human posses characteristics of both societies and that one is not necessarily more civilized than the other. As the essay progresses, the coming together of the Barbarian and the European suggests that the Cannibals are closer to the operations of Nature but will eventually progress toward the same society structure as the one present in Europe. He therefore addresses the universal human by examining both societies but not offering an absolute standard for which is more barbaric.

Show More
Related

  • Existentialism And Symbolism In The Stranger By Albert Camus

    1438 Words  | 3 Pages

    Albert Camus is a skillful writer noted for showing aspects of culture and society through the depiction of his characters. In The Stranger, Camus illustrates the existentialism culture and how that comes into play in the life of the protagonist Meursault. The Stranger, as suggested by the title, is a novel revolving around the protagonist, Meursault, who is a stranger to the French-Algerian society as he challenges its values. Camus vividly portrays Meursault’s journey through the use of imagery, irony, and symbolism. In The Stranger, Albert Camus uses the minor character, Raymond Sintes, to illustrate the contrasting nature of Meursault and how his friendship with Raymond leads to his downfall.

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Des Cannibals

    1538 Words  | 4 Pages

    In the events preceding the selected passage of Des Cannibales, Montaigne gives several situations of events in which man’s honour has been tested and proven, citing the example of the Hungarian’s merciful attitude towards their captured enemies, whom they released unharmed after having defeated them in battle. The classical reference to Seneca with the quote, “Si succiderit, de genu pugnat” foreshadows the passage in question, in which the captured Brazilians refuse to surrender or feel fear, but rather taunt their captors and remain defiant until their last breath. The passage then develops into an observation of the polygamous culture of the New World, which Montaigne praises and later goes onto defend as natural, arguing that it was customary in Biblical times and therefore should not be condemned by supposedly superior and cultured Europeans.

    Read More

  • Cannibalism In 'Of The Caniballes' By Las Casas

    1772 Words  | 4 Pages

    A grotesque body is one that is open, sickly, comprised of many parts, and overflows in excess. In Montaigne’s Of the Caniballes, Europeans view figures of cannibalism as the Native inhabitants of the New World. The consumption of humans involves opening up the contained body, allowing its inner parts to be abjected beyond its internal boundaries. For colonizers, participants of cannibalism are barbarians who eat their victims by transforming their classical bodies into grotesque forms. As a result, these cultural practices make them inferior and savage compared to the modern Europeans. However, in reality, Europeans are also closely related to cannibalistic practices. A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies written by Las Casas show how Spaniards are barbaric in their character. They lack control and engage in a series of horrific excesses due to their insatiable hunger for power and

    Read More

  • Essay on Camus’ The Stranger (The Outsider): Parallels Within

    945 Words  | 2 Pages

    Part I of The Stranger begins with Meursault's attendance at his mother's funeral. It ends with Meursault on the beach at Algiers killing a man. Part II is concerned with Meursault's trial for that same murder, his ultimate sentencing to death and the mental anguish that he experiences as a result of this sentence. Several curious parallels emerge here, especially with regard to Meursault's perception of the world.

    Read More

  • The Vampire And Their Victims

    1122 Words  | 3 Pages

    Carmilla is an example of a woman who loves her food far too much. Carmilla is consumed entirely by her food, even sleeping in a coffin of blood: “The limbs were perfectly flexible, the flesh elastic; and the leaden coffin floated with blood, in which to a depth of seven inches, the body lay immersed” (Le Fanu 102). There exists a unique relationship between the vampire and their victims. Food becomes defined in terms of victimhood, distinctly separated from humanity’s general consumption of meat. The need for human victims makes hunting synonymous with courtship, as intense emotional connections are established between the vampiress and her food. As seen in the intense relationship developed between Laura and Carmilla, the vampire is “prone to be fascinated with an engrossing vehemence, resembling the passion of love, by particular persons” (105). For Carmilla, cruelty and love are inseparable (33). The taking of the victims’ blood for sustenance is a highly sexualized exchange of fluids from one body to another. The act of consumption is transformed into an illicit carnal exchange between the hunter and the hunted.

    Read More

  • The Stranger Injustice Analysis

    1031 Words  | 3 Pages

    Albert Camus’ The Stranger offers one man’s incite into the justice of society. Monsieur Meursault, the main protagonist in the novel, believes that morals and the concept of right and wrong possess no importance. This idea influences him to act distinctively in situations that require emotion and just decision, including feeling sadness over his mother’s death, the abuse of a woman, and his killing of an innocent man. In these situations Meursault apathetically devoids himself of all emotion and abstains from dealing with the reality in front of him. When confronted by the court over his murder, he reiterates his habitual motto on life that nothing matters anyways, so why care? His uncaring response inflames the people working within the

    Read More

  • Rousseau Perfectibility Analysis

    1222 Words  | 3 Pages

    The former, a product of the human empathy and responsible for the preference of seeing no harm come to other living creatures so long at the latter is maintained. Together these maxims form the basis of the savage man’s natural state and, by extension, his tenancy of gentleness towards his fellow man (121). The civilised man, in contrast, comes to be as a result of “perfectibility”. Perfectibility, according to Rousseau is an innate human attribute to want to learn and better oneself, particularly to overcome obstacles in one’s environment. Rousseau’s description of perfectibility implies that the conditions of one’s environment have a direct influence over their character and that one can therefore deduce that regardless of man’s natural gentleness, he can develop the capacity to be cruel if so prompted by elements in his environment. Such a prompt comes as man looks to collaborate with others out of mutual self-interest. Rousseau notes that, “their connections become more intimate and extensive … there arose on one side vanity and contempt, on the other envy and shame … Men no sooner began to set a value upon each other, and know what esteem was, than each laid claim to it … It

    Read More

  • Analysis Of George Fitzhugh's Cannibals All

    1137 Words  | 3 Pages

    George Fitzhugh’s, Cannibals All (Excerpt) is a primary document that appropriately argues that it is in the United State’s best intentions to preserve negro slavery across the South and the rest of the country in effort to sustain better lives for American negroes. Frederick Douglass argues in his piece, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave that society is responsible for shaping the negro community into slavery, and that abolition is necessary to remove that from existence. The author, Fitzhugh is a considerably significant individual who has a strong political background and is recognized for pro-slavery theology, influencing him to be a prominent figure in the context of arguing for the justification of slavery.

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Camus's The Stranger

    823 Words  | 2 Pages

    The Stranger reflects the anxiety and concerns of the time period through the tension between the old hopes of religion and the cold reason of stark reality. In the midst of the build up and eruption of conflict with the Second World War, with novel being published in 1942, the unraveling of the control of religion and the marked devaluation of human life brought a number of the old hopes and old crutches of faith into question. The novel opens with “Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday.” This blunt lack of importance placed on death is used against Meursault in his trial by the prosecutor. The prosecutor so lashes out at the protagonist on his lack of acceptance of the standards of emotional response and moral expectations on this social norm that Meursault’s defense attorney demands, “Is my client on trial for burying his mother or for killing a man?” Camus’s implication is that the man is on trial for all these rejections of the norms. The prosecutor is the society and the group mind of the people struggling with these tensions. Later in the opening paragraphs, Meursault notes “mother had never given thought to religion in her life.” He then chooses to have a drink next to the coffi...

    Read More

  • The Insignificance of Women in Camus’ The Stranger

    917 Words  | 2 Pages

    In The Stranger, Camus portrays women as unnecessary beings created purely to serve materialistically and satisfy males through the lack of a deep, meaningful, relationship between Meursault and females. Throughout the text, the main character, Meursault, creates closer, more meaningful relationships with other minor characters in the story. However, in his interactions with females in this book, Meursault’s thoughts and actions center on himself and his physical desires, observations, and feelings, rather than devoting his attention to the actual female. Living in Algiers in the 1960s, Meursault originates from a post-modernist time of the decline in emotion. Meursault simply defies the social expectations and societal ‘rules’, as post-modernists viewed the world. Rather than living as one gear in the ‘machine’ of society, Meursault defies this unwritten law in the lackluster relationships between he and other females, as well as his seemingly blissful eye to society itself. In The Stranger, males, not females, truly bring out the side of Meursault that has the capacity for compassion and a general, mutual feeling relationship. For example, Marie and Meursault’s relationship only demonstrate Meursault’s lack of an emotional appetite for her. Also, with the death of Maman, Meursault remains virtually unchanged in his thoughts and desires.

    Read More

  • Brazilians in Michel de Montaigne's Essay Of Cannibals

    1317 Words  | 3 Pages

    First, Montaigne portrays Brazilians as non-barbaric people who are not like Europeans. He asserts, “I think there is nothing barbarous and savage in that nation…except that each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice” (152). Through his discussion of certain salient qualities that define these “other,” non-barbaric, Brazilian people, Montaigne actually elevates the Brazilians above Europeans. For example, he writes, “Those [Brazilian] people are wild, just as we call wild the fruits that Nature has produced by herself and in her normal course; whereas really it is those that we have changed artificially and led astray from the common order, that we should rather call wild” (152). After likening wild Brazilians to wild fruits, he implies that they both “retain alive and vigorous their genuine, their most useful and natural, virtues and properties, which we have debased in the [artificial fruits] in adapting them to gratify our corrupted taste” (152). For Montaigne, wildness and natural virtues are characteristics that are u...

    Read More

  • Thomas Hobbes And Jean Jacques Rousseau And The State Of Nature

    1865 Words  | 4 Pages

    Rousseau theorized that the “savage” in the state of nature was not selfish, like Hobbes idea, but rather it arose as a result from the person’s interaction with society. He argued that people naturally have compassion for others who are suffering and that the civil society encourages us to believe we are superior to others. Therefore, the thought of being more powerful will cause us to suppress our virtuous feelings of kindness and instead change us into selfish humans.

    Read More

  • The Stranger: Changes in Meursault

    997 Words  | 2 Pages

    In The Stranger, Albert Camus describes the life of the protagonist, Meursault, through life changing events. The passage chosen illustrates Meursault’s view during his time in prison for killing the Arab. In prison, one can see the shifts in Meursault’s character and the acceptance of this new lifestyle. Camus manipulates diction to indicate the changes in Meursault caused by time thinking of memories in prison and realization of his pointless life. Because Camus published this book at the beginning of World War II, people at this time period also questions life and death similar to how Meursault does.

    Read More

  • Rousseau’s Natural Man Favors his Sustenance

    698 Words  | 2 Pages

    Rousseau begins his discourse through a conceit regarding the difficulty of reconstructing the primitive man faultlessly. Much like the corroded status of Glaucus, over time man evolved to a barely recognizable state, and because of this Rousseau is only able to provide his judgment of the natural man (Rousseau 91). Some may believe that Rousseau makes a case for vegetarianism in his discourse, but any suggestion of vegetarianism seems to be less of what he intended to allude to and more about his personal stance. It is evident that Rousseau’s obvious compassion towards animals may have interrupted his main ideas about natural man.

    Read More

  • The Unemotional Meursault in The Stranger by Albert Camus

    682 Words  | 2 Pages

    In Albert Camus’ novel, The Stranger, the protagonist Meursault is a character who has definite values and opinions concerning the society in which he lives.  His self-inflicted alienation from society and all its habits and customs is clear throughout the book.  The novel itself is an exercise in absurdity that challenges the reader to face the nagging questions concerning the meaning of human existence. Meursault is an existentialist character who views his life in an unemotional and noncommittal manner, which enhances his obvious opinion that in the end life is utterly meaningless.

    Read More

More about On the Cannibals by Michel de Montaigne

Open Document