Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Initial Response

The first reaction I had to reading the entire piece was one of disgust on the part of the children. How could a human being leave another human being to die in a well? Yes, they were just children, but they should have known right from wrong. As I read the story again I tried to answer why the children would abandon the man to his death. In answering this question my initial feeling of disgust turned to that of pity for both the kids and for the man.

The narrator is the one who initially discovered the man stranded in the well. "I found the well, and then I heard the voice of the man in the well calling out for help (Sher21)." Because he was first on the scene I ultimately blamed the outcome on him. I believe it was his responsibility to immediately get help. Instead of getting help, however, the kids decide against it for some reason. At first, this reason was not clear to me. I kept asking myself why they would not just get a parent? I believe the answer to this question lies in what I gather to be the story's theme.

I feel the ultimate theme in this piece is power and power struggle. When the children stumble across this man stranded at the bottom of a well with no way out except through them I believe they got a taste of what having power is like. As it is for most kids, I'm sure these particular ones were often overlooked by busy parents and did not get the attention they believed they deserved. Because of this lack of attention they figured playing with the man in the well might give them power over a being weaker than they were.

"I don't think anyone smiled at how easy it was to deceive him - - this was too important (Sher22)." Why else would the children be boasting of the ease of deception unless they meant it as a sign of the power they had over the helpless man. They assert this newfound power by ignoring the man's pleas for help and by continuously asking him questions about what his name is and what he looks like as well as by bringing him food and water so that he may not starve. They start the encounter with the man in the well out with "full of games and laughter" as Sher points out on page 21. The time of having fun ends eventually though when one of the children lets one of their names slip out to the man.

Once the man has the name you would think that he ultimately gains the power over the children. It turns out that this is not so because now the children will definitely not help him out of the well for fear of getting in trouble since the man could now identify each child by name. The man in the well paid the ultimate price in the struggle for power because the children were so frightened of the fact that the man had their names that they all ranaway never to come back again. "That night it rained...After that we didn't play by the well anymore (Sher26)." We can infer from the fact that it rained and that most likely no one else stumbled across the man in the well that the children gained the ultimate amount of power by letting the man die at the bottom of that well.

At the start of this response I stated that I was disgusted with the outcome, but ultimately I came to pity it. I still am disgusted at what one human can do to another, but I also pity the lives of the children because it appeared to me that they were so power hungry from being ignored by their parents that they would let a man die just to feel important. As I said before this story showcased the ultimate power struggle.

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