The Death Of Benny Paret Analysis

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Violence has become a normalized concept in society.Children play video games based on beating and shooting others, people watch violent news stories without a second thought, and people watch people hit, punch, and fight each other for pure entertainment. In Norman Mailer’s “The Death of Benny Paret” Mailer assigns animalistic qualities to the boxers, comparisons of the boxers to inanimate objects, and pacing to convey that boxing is inhuman and uncivilized. In Mailer’s piece he assigns animalistic qualities to the two boxers in the ring. He described Paret after he was hit by saying “Paret walked three disgusted steps away, showing his hindquarters” (Mailer,1). No one has ever described a human as having “hindquarters” by using this description it shows that Paret becomes an animal that’s ready to fight no matter how injured and beaten he got, he wasn’t going to step down, much like two animals fighting. Mailer then says Griffith “was like a cat ready to rip the life out of a huge boxed rat” (1). Mailer comparing Griffith to a bloodthirsty cat stalking its prey proves that boxing turns people who have human feelings and morals into uncivilized animals. They can’t stop themselves once they have their eyes set on their prey. Just as Mailer assigned animalistic qualities to proves boxing is
The entire fight seems to go on for hours and Mailer uses a series of comparisons and similes to describe every minute gritty detail of the fight, it feels like the fight was 45 minutes rather than 45 seconds. The actual death of Benny Paret almost feels as if his death is an afterthought, that it wasn’t the paramount part of the fight, but rather the hypnotizing and engrossing fight that just consumed this large audience. By doing this it displays that no one really cared about his death, but just about the entertainment of the fight justifying the inhumanity of the

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