The Most Dangerous Game Literary Analysis

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Killing is not always murder, this distinction is represented many times in the short story, “The Most Dangerous Game” written by Richard Connel. The main characters, Sanger Rainsford and General Zaroff’s, lives revolve around animals and humans being killed. Murder is based on an external conflict, the act of one man killing another man along with every event leading up to one’s final breath. One man killing another man brings on strong emotions involving the internal conflict of the characters. Making the decision of what is murder and what is not lies in the element of irony. Taking another beings life cannot always be considered murder, this will be identified through external conflicts, internal conflicts, and the irony within murder.
Taking another man’s life represents a man versus man, external conflict. Rainsford and Zaroff both killed men in the war; this is not typically viewed as murder. Zaroff relates the killing in war to his hunting of men to compare his actions to Rainsford’s, “Did not make me condone cold-blooded murder, finished Rainsford, stiffly” (Connell 49). While Rainsford saw the murder in Zaroff’s actions, Rainsford too became part of the conflict. Rainsford killed another man in a situation most would consider an act of self-defense, not murder, “But Ivan was not. The knife, driven by …show more content…

Internal conflict involves what we believe in. Rainsford see’s the fault in what Zaroff does as his sport and expresses his feeling towards it, “Hunting? Good God, General Zaroff, what you speak of is murder” (49). Rainsford is put in conflicting situations in the story where he must have to go beyond his morals and kill another man, “On guard, Rainsford… He had never slept in a better bed, Rainsford decided” (57). The internal conflicts reside in the thoughts of Rainsford and the actions he knows he must

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