The Dangerous Game

“The Dangerous Game”

-- Richard Connell

“…Hunting, remember, had been my life.  I have heard that in America businessmen often go to pieces when they give up the business that has been their life”

           

            I know when I was younger and I used to think how people, for example could be prejudice another, I was naïve in the sense that I didn’t reason with how they came to be like that.  When something is apart of your life for an extensive amount of time, and suddenly it’s gone, it’s like a sudden void has become aware and you will do anything to get it back.  For the people who were prejudice, they continued their beliefs.  For the man hunting animals, he began hunting humans. 

            Why?  Sure, when something I once loved starts to become a bore, I try to reinvent it to where it becomes challenging again in a fun and harmless way.  But how far is too far?  I came to discover my own sense of hunting other beings.  Not just Rainsford and General Zaroff but including all hunters in general lacks a sense of sensibility for their prey.  And I’m not saying we shouldn’t not kill animals.  Many people eat meat on a regular occurrence; I eat meat on a regular occurrence.  But at what part does it become inhumane?  When we start killing and hunting our own race?  Does that make us prejudice toward animals themselves?  It’s interesting to think about this in a light of different perspectives.  Literature has always taught me to try and open myself up and peer into the mind of the author, and to go even further, into the mind of a character, specifically the antagonist in this piece and see things from the way he saw them.  He was beat by his own game in the end.   Does that matter in terms of how things would have turned out if he had let the game of hunting animals continue to bore him to a point where he would no longer have any passion for it?  I look at his continuous hunting cycle as a void he was trying to fill in life.  Who lives on an island by himself with a giant dummy?  And kills for fun?  Must he have had no family, no loved ones, no friends prior to this lifestyle?  Hunting fed his emptiness.  And to feed any kind of emptiness with lesser things other than the core root of what’s causing it is a sad, sad, thing to do.  You can’t win that one in the end.