Learning from Mistakes: Lessons from Literature

“Nobody’s perfect. Everyone makes mistakes. But some mistakes will teach you great lessons and make you a better person”. Mistakes occur in different forms, they can be minor or world-changing. But no matter how much or how little a mistake has impacted a life, humans must learn from them in order to improve. Humans must learn from the mistakes they make and the problem they see. Even in the fictional world, characters are making errors. From the mistakes characters make in different short stories, the characters and readers can both learn a lesson from them.

After some naive and reckless actions, Lizabeth, the protagonist of “Marigolds” learns her lesson. The short story, written in 1969 by Eugenia Collier, tells of a young girl growing

General Zaroff from “The Most Dangerous Game” made the mistake of being overconfident which resulted in his death. The short story by Richard Connell describes the hunter Rainsford’s experience on Ship-Trap Island. He meets a strange man called General Zaroff, who introduces him to his game of hunting humans. He allows a human three hours to run and hide, then they must survive for three days without being found by the General. Rainsford has no choice but to agree to the game. With the help of different traps, Rainsford bruises the General’s arm, kills one of his hunting dogs and the General’s butler. Despite these small successes the general had many opportunities to shoot Rainsford and Rainsford soon realized “The general was playing with him. The general was saving him for another day’s sport” (31). At the end of the third day, Rainsford jumps into the sea to evade General Zaroff then swims back to the island only to reappear in the general’s bedroom. They face off and Rainsford kills General Zaroff. If General Zaroff had killed Rainsford the first opportunity he got, he would not have been killed. The general was very confident about him winning that he did not think Rainsford to be a threat. He did not know the skills Rainsford possessed and underestimated him. From “The Most Dangerous Game” readers can learn not to underestimate the threat of the