Ignorance In The Most Dangerous Game, By Richard Connell

Ernest Hemingway once said, “All things truly wicked start from innocence.” Although this observation holds much truth, I would assert that the flaws and the corruption of human nature stem from simple ignorance instead of innocence. In the case of human selfishness, we can glimpse upon how selfishness develops from ignorance at the beginning of the short story, “The Most Dangerous Game”, by Richard Connell. Whitney and Rainsford, both hunters, talk about how a jaguar may feel about being hunted, in which Rainsford justifies his hunting by saying that the game cannot reason. Subsequently, Whitney responds to this by saying that he believes that the quarry understands the “fear of pain and the fear of death”, at the very least. Inspecting …show more content…
As stated in the introduction, our experiences make us confront the morality of our beliefs by justifying our beliefs or considering other possible viewpoints, which can increase or decrease our selfishness. At the beginning of the story, Rainsford does the former by being unconcerned about his game’s feelings, but he comes to understand “now how an animal at bay feels” when he is hunted by General Zaroff, confirming that experiences do influence a person’s selfishness. Adding on to this, Whitney’s hunting forces him to contemplate the selfishness of hunting game for sport, which he observes that the quarries are probably frightened of death and pain. In the story, General Zaroff’s selfish man hunts were caused by his childhood experiences; when he shot animals such as his father’s prize turkeys that he wasn’t supposed to shoot, he was praised by his father who said that his “hand was made for the trigger”. As a result, he took a lifelong interest in hunting and eventually started to hunt humans due to not being corrected as a child. Stating that life “is for the strong, to be lived by the strong, and, if needs be, taken by the strong”, General Zaroff justifies his man hunts by also saying that it is a right of his, because he is strong. His belief in this strengthens each time he triumphs over “the scum of the earth”, demonstrating that his experiences increase his selfishness through confirmation bias. To sum these examples up, whether we reinforce or reconsider our beliefs may partially depend on the person’s personality or if the experiences beget ignorance, but our experiences impact our natural