Who Is Hop Frog A Hero

In Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “Hop Frog,” the main character Hop Frog is justified in his act of revenge because the king uses Hop Frog for his own pleasure yet Hop Frog may have taken his revenge too far by killing eight people. Hop Frog is taken from his country and put into a society where they mock him because of how he looks and acts. Hop Frog is abused emotionally and physically by the king talking down to him and treating him as a toy not a person and making him drink to get a few laughs for his own pure enjoyment while Hop Frog is miserable:
His value was trebled in the eyes of the king, by the fact of his being also a dwarf
and a cripple. Dwarfs were as common at court, in those days, as fools; and many monarchs would have found

it difficult to get through their days without both a jester to laugh with, and a dwarf to laugh at. But, as I have already observed, your jesters, in the ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, are fat, round and unwieldy- so that it was no small source of self-gratulation with out king that, in Hop Frog he possessed a triplicate treasure in one person (Poe 899-900).
The king picked our features such as dwarf and cripple to use as a joke in order to make himself feel and look better.

Hop Frog was the king’s own personal toy and many times he laughed with the king, but overall he was laughed at. This can make a person downgrade themselves and face sadness because they are not appreciated appropriately. The king defines Hop Frog as fat, round, and unwieldy, which in a sense is a cruel thing to say to anyone, especially someone already being laughed at. All this information put together could lead someone to act out in a way that ends in murder. On another hand, Hop Frog may not be justified because the only person treating Hop Frog so badly is the king. Hop Frog killed eight men by stringing them up, tar and feather them, and burning them alive in front of the townspeople. This seems almost inhuman for a person to act this

way:
Ah, ha! Said at length the infuriated jester. Ah, ha! I begin to see who these
people are, now! Here, pretending to scrutinize the king more closely, he held the flambeau to the flaxen coat which enveloped him, and which instantly burst into a sheet of vivid flame. In less than half a minute the whole eight ourang-outangs were blazing fiercely, amid the shrieks of the multitude who gazed at them from below, horror-stricken, and without the power to render them the slightest assistance (Poe 907).
Being a higher power in society leads someone to act in a powerful snobbish way to others under you.

If you are that person under the higher power and start to feel worthless in society then you should leave or talk to someone. What Hop Frog did was completely unjustified, his actions were taken to far. The king might have taken everything from him, but that does not mean you can take eight people's lives and seven of those lives did not deserve to die. It was the king who had the power over everyone and making others act the way he wanted them to. If Hop Frog wanted someone to suffer for what he went through he should have only killed the king. Overall Hop Frog was justified because of the way the king treated him he had the right to do what he did. On the other hand he was also unjustified because he took more lives than was justifiably

right.

Works Cited
Poe, Edgar Allan. "Hop Frog." The Flag of Our Union. March. 1849. N.P. Project Gutenberg's
The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, by Edgar Allan Poe. Vol. 2. Web. 19 Feb. 2014.