Type of Work and Year of Publication. The word game in the title of the story has two meanings: 1 human beings as Zaroff's quarry and 2 the competition, or game, between the hunter Zaroff and the hunted Rainsford and other human quarry. The action takes place shortly after the First World War. The story opens in the Caribbean on a Brazil-bound yacht and continues on a mysterious Caribbean island. He exhibits no pity or sympathy for the animals he hunts.
Safe at last! Those jaguars in the Amazon will just have to wait for their day of reckoning. As a result of becoming bored with the available game in the world, Zaroff has turned to hunting those that can reason and present a greater challenge.
Rainsford is horrified by Zaroff's revelation. Zaroff invites Rainsford to hunt with him but Rainsford declines citing exhaustion. That night Rainsford is unable to sleep. The next day he learns that he is either to serve as Zaroff's newest prey or fall into the burly, violent hands of Ivan. He elects the former and immediately sets off into the jungle.
After a few hours of zigzagging through the dense jungle, he climbs a tree to hide from his adversary. Incredibly, despite the elusive trail, Zaroff is able to easily find Rainsford.
However, in order to prolong the fun of the game, Zaroff leaves Rainsford without harming him. Rainsford panics and is subject to a few other encounters with Zaroff.
Each time he gets closer and closer to defeating his foe through the use of primitive traps. Unfortunately, he is unable to trap his pursuer. He does manage to kill one of Zaroff's prized dogs and Ivan.
In the final chase, Rainsford dives off the edge of the cliff into the ocean. Zaroff is disappointed to have lost his worthy adversary and returns to his house crestfallen.
The Vietnam war was raging with no end in sight. Daniel Ellsberg who was a brilliant young man and Harvard graduate who considered himself a patriot. He had joined the Marines after graduating from college and served a tour of duty as an officer. He was employed by the Rand Corporation, a public policy think-tank and research organization where he was deployed to serve in the Pentagon in Washington, D.
Although he may not have been as hawkish as some of those around him, he was a supporter of the war and wanted to do his part in helping the U. In his position as the Pentagon he was cleared to read the majority of the cables sent to the Pentagon from the warfront. He began to see a difference between the story that was emerging from the on-the-ground commanders in Vietnam and the PR that the White House and Pentagon peddled to the American people. There was no sign of victory or even progress in the cables he read yet the press releases from the White House boasted of great progress and the successful curtailing of the spread of communism in Indochina.
However, initially it did not chance his advocacy for the war and eventual victory. But as time passed, Ellsberg became more and more dismayed by what he saw and heard. An incident referred to as the Gulf of Tonkin incident sparked the escalation of U. Ellsberg was privy to the back and forth transmissions between the warfront and the Pentagon. But what Rainsford sees as bonding over a mutual love for hunting has a sinister dimension that he has yet to fully grasp.
Though exiled from his home country, Zaroff clearly had the resources to live wherever he liked, and he chose a remote island. Though many men would proudly declare that hunting is their favorite hobby, claiming that killing things is his purpose in life indicates the mind of a psychopath.
After Rainsford presses him, Zaroff explains that he prefers to hunt humans because unlike animals, humans possess the faculty of reason and are, therefore, more dangerous and exciting to hunt. His long lead-up to revealing that he hunts humans demonstrates that Zaroff knows killing humans outside of warfare is socially unacceptable, and that he rejects society and its ethics.
He enjoys hunting humans not despite but because of their capacity for feelings and rational thought. At the beginning of the story, Rainsford refuses to entertain the idea that animals feel anything—let alone that they are able to reason.
As a foil to Rainsford, Zaroff openly declares his passion for hunting advanced, intelligent prey. Shocked, Rainsford insists that Zaroff is committing murder, and refuses his invitation to participate in the manhunt. Here Connell has the characters play around with the blurry ethical lines between socially condoned killing hunting and warfare and murder. Zaroff demonstrates for Rainsford how he stocks the island with fresh human prey by tricking ships to sail into the cliffs with guiding lights.
He boasts about having electricity and trying to be civilized. Again, Rainsford is outraged. The game, Zaroff explains, is that he gives the man hunting clothes, a supply of food, a hunting knife, and a three-hour head start. He follows with a small pistol, and if the hunted man eludes him for three days, he wins. Only one man has come close to winning, and then Zaroff used his hunting dogs.
Perhaps intending to sound fair, Zaroff reveals the hypocrisy both in his game and in social Darwinist ideology: the playing field is never even, and the circumstances never fair. Though he provides resources to the hunted men, they were never meant to stand a chance against him, and their inevitable failure just reinforces his belief that they were always inferior—and therefore justifiable prey.
Rainsford asks what happens if the men refuse to be hunted, and Zaroff explains that the men can choose to participate in his game or be handed over to Ivan , who was a professional torturer for the Russian Czar. Choosing between being hunted with no hope of winning or being tortured to death is not a choice at all. Now knowing that Zaroff is a serial killer, the reader must wonder whether this collection is of animal or human heads.
Suddenly, the familiar custom seems newly grotesque. Once in his room, Rainsford realizes that he is not in a fancy paradise, but rather a well-disguised prison. Rainsford demands to leave the island immediately, but Zaroff insists they will hunt that night. Rainsford refuses to hunt with him, and Zaroff gives him the choice between being hunted or being given to Ivan. Excited to have pulled Rainsford into his game, Zaroff toasts to finally having an adversary worthy of his skills.
Zaroff blames the hunted man for his own death and for not providing enough entertainment in dying, much as social Darwinism blames minorities and the socially oppressed for not thriving in a system that is engineered to disadvantage them. When Rainsford asks what happens if he wins, Zaroff assures him that he can leave the island , but on the condition that he never tells anyone about his experiences there.
Zaroff jumps into preparations for the hunt, even giving Rainsford tips about what shoes to wear and dangerous places on the island to avoid.
0コメント