There comes a time in everyone 's life where they have been wronged by another person. Whether it was someone stealing another your lunch out of the company fridge or finding out your lover has been carrying out an affair behind there back, it is human nature to want to seek revenge. However, taking the highroad and turning the other cheek is the moral thing to do. What if someone killed your only child would that change anything on the matter? In the short story titled “Killings”, author Andre Dubus reflects the desire to seek revenge by appealing to the readers ethics, emotions, and by creating tension throughout the story. The story “Killings” is about a young man who falls in love with a married women but gets murdered by her husband. After
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From the start of the story Dubus get the reader thinking about ethics. The story begins at the grave side of the victim of murder. “On August morning when Matt Fowler buried his youngest son, Frank, who had lived for twenty-one years, eight months and four days, Matt 's older son, Steve turned to him as the family left the grave and walked between their friends and said: “I should kill him.””(1123). Steve his reflecting his frustration of the murder of his brother with acting out his anger and killing Franks murderer . What is considered the ethical thing to do is let the legal system carry out the punishment. Throughout the evolution of mankind a legal system has been created to take care of situations like this. This system is mutually beneficial for all that take part in it. It works because no one can steal from you, you cannot steal from anyone, no one should harm you, you cannot harm anyone etc.. This creates a balance of peace and harmony in the world. People still commit crimes so this world is not perfect but it has been agreed that those who do will be punished. This is why letting the legal is the ethical thing to do. However as the reader soon finds out the punishment given by the prosecutor does not match the …show more content…
Richard Strout is the son of a very wealthy business man that has no problem in using his money to get Richard out of prison. When he makes bail Steve 's parents, Matt and Ruth, are shocked on how the legal system treated this case. Matt states “ I did not think of bail. I thought I wouldn 't have to worry about him for years. She sees him all the time. It makes her cry.” (1124). Matt is talking about how Ruth has to see her sons own murder walk free and that effects her. Terrible psychological pain must come from not only losing a child but seeing the murder walk freely. A quote from the television show American Horror Story does a great job a putting this feeling into words and it says “They say when a parent dies, a child feels his own mortality, but when a child dies, it 's immortality that a parent loses”. It is the parent of the child that is supposed to go first and not the child and when that happens great sorrow surrounds the parent. Richard murdered Steve in cold blood and the punishment should be equal to the crime. The old saying an eye for an eye may apply to this situation. So instead of being able to walk freely and haunt the parents of the victim, Richard should be serving life in prison or maybe even the death penalty for this crime At this point the ethics of the legal system has failed in caring out the right
From the start of the story Dubus get the reader thinking about ethics. The story begins at the grave side of the victim of murder. “On August morning when Matt Fowler buried his youngest son, Frank, who had lived for twenty-one years, eight months and four days, Matt 's older son, Steve turned to him as the family left the grave and walked between their friends and said: “I should kill him.””(1123). Steve his reflecting his frustration of the murder of his brother with acting out his anger and killing Franks murderer . What is considered the ethical thing to do is let the legal system carry out the punishment. Throughout the evolution of mankind a legal system has been created to take care of situations like this. This system is mutually beneficial for all that take part in it. It works because no one can steal from you, you cannot steal from anyone, no one should harm you, you cannot harm anyone etc.. This creates a balance of peace and harmony in the world. People still commit crimes so this world is not perfect but it has been agreed that those who do will be punished. This is why letting the legal is the ethical thing to do. However as the reader soon finds out the punishment given by the prosecutor does not match the …show more content…
Richard Strout is the son of a very wealthy business man that has no problem in using his money to get Richard out of prison. When he makes bail Steve 's parents, Matt and Ruth, are shocked on how the legal system treated this case. Matt states “ I did not think of bail. I thought I wouldn 't have to worry about him for years. She sees him all the time. It makes her cry.” (1124). Matt is talking about how Ruth has to see her sons own murder walk free and that effects her. Terrible psychological pain must come from not only losing a child but seeing the murder walk freely. A quote from the television show American Horror Story does a great job a putting this feeling into words and it says “They say when a parent dies, a child feels his own mortality, but when a child dies, it 's immortality that a parent loses”. It is the parent of the child that is supposed to go first and not the child and when that happens great sorrow surrounds the parent. Richard murdered Steve in cold blood and the punishment should be equal to the crime. The old saying an eye for an eye may apply to this situation. So instead of being able to walk freely and haunt the parents of the victim, Richard should be serving life in prison or maybe even the death penalty for this crime At this point the ethics of the legal system has failed in caring out the right