As the narrator changes in behavior, he commits murder and becomes consumed in guilt. There are many instances where the narrator’s guilt takes over his personality. As alcohol takes over the narrator’s life and changes his behavior, he cuts out the eye of Pluto. Reminded of his cruelty by the cat’s eye, the narrator tries to free himself from the guilt and kills the cat by hanging it. After committing the murder, he doesn’t seem to realize the amount of guilt he has, insisting that he is not concerned with what he commits. After the crime, it seems as if the narrator’s subconscious is preventing him from making good choices. The narrator's guilt is subsided by the appearance of a new cat. After he brings the new cat home, he starts to resent
Carcasses attract scavengers. The Guilty Party by O. Henry showcases the untimely death of a girl of twelve, Liz. Above Chrystie Street on the east side, a strange bird stalks the children of the playground. Although people say it’s a stork, locals call it a vulture. In this case, Liz is the carcass that the vulture sets its eyes on.
Throughout The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne attempted to expose the varying ways in which different people deal with lingering guilt from sins they have perpetrated. The contrasting characters of Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale ideally exemplified the differences in thought and behavior people have for guilt. Although they were both guilty of committing the same crime, these two individuals differed in that one punished themselves with physical and mental torture and the other chose to continue on with their life, devoting it to those less fortunate than they.
In the aftermath of a comparatively minor misfortune, all parties concerned seem to be eager to direct the blame to someone or something else. It seems so easy to pin down one specific mistake that caused everything else to go wrong in an everyday situation. However, war is a vastly different story. War is ambiguous, an enormous and intangible event, and it cannot simply be blamed for the resulting deaths for which it is indirectly responsible. Tim O’Brien’s story, “In the Field,” illustrates whom the soldiers turn to with the massive burden of responsibility for a tragedy. The horrible circumstances of war transform all involved and tinge them with an absurd feeling of personal responsibility as they struggle to cope.
Lizzie Borden is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of slaughtering her father and stepmother in cold blood.
Arthur Dimmesdale is a fictional character written by Nathaniel Hawthorne in the 1850’s from the book, “The Scarlet Letter.” Arthur Dimmesdale went through great lengths of guilt and suffering throughout the book. He is a Puritan minister who had a child named Pearl, whose mother was Hester Prynne. They hide their relationship together in the years of Pearl growing up. Arthur Dimmesdale was the only Puritan out of four main characters in The Scarlet Letter. Dimmesdale knows that he has sinned in the very beginning of the novel, but kept all his feelings inside, letting the guilt overwhelm him until the end. When he committed adultery, he knew that what he did was wrong, but at the time he had only put
Guilt acts as one of the strongest and most prominent emotions humans feel throughout their lives. Guilt can cause people to help others, push through obstacles, or make friends. Guilt, however, may not stop one from doing amoral actions. This can happen as a result of a perceived bonus outweighing the negative feeling one may experience from completing the action, or a heat of the moment action, where one may not fully understand the consequences of their actions.
Everyone deals with guilt at least one time throughout their life, and several authors use guilt to help build up suspense in their story. Guilt in Macbeth not only affects his mental state of mind, but it also destroys him physically, along with a few other characters such as Lady Macbeth. The characters are affected by guilt so much, that it actually leads to their death essentially, just because they were not able to handle the consequences for the events that occurred. Despite being destroyed by guilt, they were still forced to carry on with their lives and they did have to try to hide it, even though Macbeth was not doing so well with that. His hallucinations were giving him up and eventually everyone knew the he had murdered Duncan so he could become the next king.
He brutally describes him stabbing the cats eye, "I took from my waistcoat-pocket a penknife, opened it, grasped the poor beast by the throat, and deliberately cut one of its eyes from the socket"(p5) Pluto’s perspective of his master went from loving to fear and recognizing cruelty, experiencing both a literal and physiological change of vision. From then on Pluto sees his master differently, and sees the world differently as well in result of his now one eye. Additionally, the reader's eyes for his cat are sharpened and changed at this moment as well. The madness in the Black Cat then escalates when the narrator's hatred for Pluto consumed him, and he hangs him outside the garden.Mysteriously, when coming home drunk a few weeks after the murder of his cat, a black cat similar to Pluto appears in front of the narrator, missing an eye as well but has white fur on its stomach unlike Pluto. He brings the cat home in hope it will replace the cat he now misses and remorses for killing. Soon his liking for his cat turned to bitterness and hatred. The madness inside of him decreased with the death of Pluto, and returned with
Guilt acts as one of the strongest and most prominent emotions humans feel throughout their lives. Guilt can cause people to help others, push through obstacles, or make friends. Guilt, however, may not stop one from doing amoral actions. This can happen as a result of a perceived bonus outweighing the negative feeling one may experience from completing the action, or a heat of the moment action, where one may not fully understand the consequences of their actions.
The story opens with the narrator telling the readers: “But tomorrow I die, and today I would unburden my soul.” This quote shows that he wants to free his soul from the guilt he carries within himself. This short story centers on a black cat named Pluto (Roman god of the dead) and the deterioration of a man. Pluto, the cat, is the man’s favorite pet and playmate. “I alone fed him, and he attended me wherever I went about the house. It was even with difficulty that I could prevent him from following me through the streets.” These are examples of the loving feeling he has towards his feline friend. Their friendship lasted in such manner for several years. The conflict unfolds when the man’s personality starts to change; “I grew, day by day, more moody, more irritable, and more regardless of the feelings of others.” These changes come when he starts drinking profoundly a f...
In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the theme of guilt and conscience is one of many explored throughout the play. Macbeth, is a well respected Scottish noble who in the beginning of the play is a man everyone looks up to; however as the play progresses he makes a number of bad decisions. Eventually, as a result of his actions he suffers guilt and this plays heavily upon his character until his personality is completely destroyed. Shakespeare uses a range of techniques in order to develop this theme such as, characters, imagery.
William Shakespeare was an English poet, and playwright during the Renaissance. Despite being a playwright in this fourteenth century era, Shakespeare has become famous in the modern due to fabulous works like Macbeth. Macbeth, which is based on a true event, is set in Scotland and England. It is one of the most famous pieces of English literature, and consists of a dramatic tragedy which includes the death of the noble King Duncan. It is extremely important as a reader of Macbeth to focus on the main characters and big picture, disregarding all the fluff. In Macbeth, William Shakespeare explains the theme of fate versus guilt, to develop characters while simultaneously strengthening the plot.
The fixation on the old man's vulture-like eye forces the narrator to concoct a plan to eliminate the old man. The narrator confesses the sole reason for killing the old man is his eye: "Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees - very gradually - I made up my mind to rid myself of the eye for ever" (34). The narrator begins his tale of betrayal by trying to convince the reader he is not insane, but the reader quickly surmises the narrator indeed is out of control. The fact that the old man's eye is the only motivation to murder proves the narrator is so mentally unstable that he must search for justification to kill. In his mind, he rationalizes murder with his own unreasonable fear of the eye.
...at the hands of his master. The mutilation of its eye, hanging it to death from a tree and killing his wife, which had shown the cat love. There are two interpretations you can take away from this story, the logic of guilt or supernatural fantasy. Which conclusion will you take?
This same theme of perversity and guilt-ridden confession can be seen in another one of Poe’s short stories, The Black Cat. Although the story begins normally, a wife and husband with multiple pets, it does not stay that way. It is possible to interpret the Pluto and the new cat as the narrator’s conscience. Both cats are representations of the narrator’s conscience because of how it never died. Pluto was replaced by the new cat which became a constant reminder of what he did to Pluto. The similarities between Pluto and the new cat brings him to say, “it had at length, assumed a rigorous distinctness of outline. It was now the representation of an object that I shudder to name” (Poe 3). Eventually he gives into the guilt that is he is reminded of by the new cat. Some might think the perverseness is the new cat but upon further analysis, the guilt that the narrator feels due to his