General Zaroff Insane Quotes

General Zaroff Analysis

The man was running, running for his life. He did not want to look back, for he was being hunted. He ran and ran, until finally he could not run anymore. But, he was an intelligent man, therefore he had a plan. He ran and jumped off the cliff. This caused the hunter to believe he was dead. However the huntee was just getting started. He got back to the hunters mansion and bam! He fed him to the dogs therefore, through his madness, General Zaroff drives the book’s theme of walk a mile in someone else’s shoes.

In “The Most Dangerous Game” by Richard Connell, Gen. Zaroff is shown as insane, intelligent and competitive. Zaroff is shown to be insane in the story when he explains who he hunts. “So I said: ‘What are the attributes of an ideal quarry?’ and the answer was of course ‘It must have courage, cunning, and be able to reason… My dear fellow, there is one that can… Why should I not be serious, I am speaking of hunting” (Connell 69-70). This quote shows that Gen. Zaroff demented is because during this part, he is hunting humans for fun. During the

story, Gen. Zaroff is also intelligent. He shows that he is intelligent when this happens, “This island is called Ship Trap… Sometimes an angry god of high seas sends them to me… I help Providence a bit… They indicate a channel, where there’s none: crouch like a sea monster with wide-open jaws, they can crush ships as easily as I crush nuts.” (Connell 70). Zaroff shows that he is intelligent during this scene because he created a way to gather “prey” without having to rely on mother nature. Lastly, Zaroff is also competitive in the story. He is competitive when he says this, “To this date I have not lost” (Connell 72). Gen. Zaroff is insane, intelligent, and competitive in the story “The Most Dangerous Game” because he is a crazed man that had the idea to “hunt” men, the only creature that can fight back with reason. He is competitive because he made this dangerous game and kept winning until he finally met his match.
The theme of The Most Dangerous Game is walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. Rainsford is a die hard hunter; he doesn’t have sympathy for any animal he kills- as explained through his conversation with Whitney. When he makes the remark, “Don’t talk rot, Whitney… You’re a big-game hunter, not a philosopher. Who cares how a jaguar feels” (Connell 60), to Whitney. This shows that all he cares about is hunting and that it is a sport to him. Once, Rainsford finds out that Gen. Zaroff hunts humans. Now one can infer that he will find out that Rainsford will know what it is like to be hunted. When Gen. Zaroff makes the remark “Tonight… we will hunt-you and I” (Connell 73). Rainsford turned it down, leaving him with two options be hunted or tortured. He chose to be hunted, this begins the feeling of knowing what the prey feels like. After being hunted for some time Rainsford began to feel more terrified exampled here, “Rainsford froze there, every muscle tensed for a spring” (Connell 76). This is how the jaguar felt when Rainsford hunted him. Therefore Rainsford, by being the prey, walked in the jaguar’s shoes. Rainsford was a big game hunter that was not sympathetic person. He thought of the animals as a trophy more than a living creature. Once he met Gen. Zaroff he became more understanding. This is because he became the hunted. He knew the feeling of always having to look over his shoulder and how it felt to be on the run. Rainsford by the the end of this was a more understanding, sympathetic man.
The theme of the story, walk a mile in someone else’s shoes, is applied to Zaroff differently than it is applied to Rainsford.

Zaroff is a winner, that’s all he has ever known. If take the fact that he doesn’t lose and add it to his competitive personality; it creates one hard headed man that hates to lose. When he began to lose leverage while hunting Rainsford, he started to doubt himself. Like when Zaroff gets deceived when Rainsford jumps off the cliff and “dies”. He was deceived because later that night, Rainsford approaches Zaroff in his own home. Another situation where Zaroff begins to lose leverage is when he was slowed up by one of Rainsford traps. This got under his skin, causing him lose his composure. Lastly, when he actually loses, Rainsford feeds him to the dogs, ending his hunting career for good. All of these examples show how Zaroff walked as a loser for the first time in his

life.
This is how Gen. Zaroff embodied the theme of The Most Dangerous of walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. Gen. Zaroff was a crazy man who hated to lose. Once he began to lose, he couldn’t take it and shut down. That’s how he walks in someone else’s shoes. He is a winner and does not know how to lose. Imagine how that would feel, to go from being a winner to a loser, and what you finally lost was your life.