Beauty In The Snake And Harrison Bergeron

Beauty in all its forms brings joy, but it can be also be a very dangerous thing as the desire for beauty or the hatred of ugliness can lead to unimaginable actions. Both “The Snake” and “Harrison Bergeron” display beauty, but more importantly, a representation of that beauty getting destroyed. In “The Snake,” a young boy kills a beautiful snake because he simply could not see the beauty or even comprehend that beauty can be found in an animal. While in “Harrison Bergeron” Diana demolished beauty out of jealousy because she saw the beauty which she could not accept. When an individual sees something that is uncomprehendingly beautiful, they will destroy it.
Characters in the two stories believe that they are doing the right thing by killing …show more content…
The boy in “The Snake” possesses has the idea that snakes can only be ugly and dangerous. He refuses to even consider the idea that a snake could be beautiful and harmless, even though an outstanding animal is present right in front of his eyes. He only sees an animal that kills and could in no way be beautiful. It was this childish reasoning that leads him to kill the animal. He did not care about the consequences for killing, and he was joyful even after his uncle tried to show him his wrong doings. Calling the snake ugly was just an excuse for his killing; he chose to ignore the beauty of the snake for his own childish reasons. It is shown that he knew there are no poisonous snakes in the area, proving the boy only killed the snake because he has accepted the ugliness in the snake, even though it is absent. He refused so see it any other way as his uncle asked “The snake was beautiful. Didn’t you see how beautiful it was?” but the boy on auto-pilot again said “Snakes are ugly and bad” (Krause 3).The boy’s uncle repeatedly tries to get his nephew to understand or even see that the snake was indeed not ugly, but the boy’s opinion was so firm that logic no longer prevailed. His uncle tries to reason with him and asks him critical questions but all the boy had to say was that snakes are ugly and dangerous. This is because in his unconscious mind, it is permanently imprinted that snakes are ugly since the boy was immature he was unable to think open mindedly. And it is this thinking that prevents him from accepting or even seeing the beauty. He believes all ugly things should die, since the snake to him was nothing but ugly, it had to be killed. Similarly, in “Harrison Bergeron” it is seen that if someone is more beautiful than you, they need to go. That is the mindset of Diana