A Good Man Is Hard To Find And Mandrake From Owen Marshall's Coming

The idea of villainy has always been a present factor in fiction and real life. From the Joker to Hitler, we are left wondering what causes the heinous acts these villains commit. We often associate villains with their past, that their past caused a switch to flip within their brains, a switch we all very well may possess. Rather, I believe that evil is fatalistic within humans from birth and the villains that exist within our lives and our works of fiction are predetermined to become evil. To convey this theory I analysed four different characters, two of which argued my theory and are villains created through the system, these are The Misfit from Flannery O’Connors short story A Good Man is Hard to Find and Mandrake from Owen Marshall’s Coming

This is a common quote used throughout literature and utilised to spark psychological conversations and debates. Of course, everybody is born with the capacity for evil, much like everybody has the capacity for greatness, we humans are but catalysts to our own beliefs and choices which shall dictate our destiny and fate. Sometimes, however, our choices put us on the wrong side of the law, justified or not. Such an event could lead to a domino effect that suscepts us to the evil natures dormant within us since birth. Mandrake from Owen Marshall's short story Coming Home in the Dark released in 1995 expertly weaves in the concept that one's nature is tainted by exterior forces and not a decision that was made at one's point in life. Mandrake is a skinny man, not starved but not well fed, he wears a denim jacket, old, worn clothes, he walks with his chest out, clearly from his appearance we can gather that he isnt somebody who cares about most things and like they say “clearly not nature lovers”. “The big fucking mistake is to think that evil and beauty are antithetical,” Mandrake tells Hoaggie this philosophical idea, not to enlighten him or to try to make Hoaggie understand his choices but simply because he can. Much like the idea that evil and beauty aren’t antithetical, Mandrake personifies this concept. As a society, especially during the 1990s when many villainous acts were acts of physical violence like murder or driveby’s villainy was especially

If I was to explain the premise of these characters without telling you what they do within the story, you would think they were the hero or at least a figure of hope and knowledge. Whether or not criminals should be given a second chance is a deep rabbit hole in politics, one that has been filled and dug deeper over centuries. For a character to be damaged by the system, it often suggests that the character was pure to begin with and found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. One thing I find particularly interesting about the character trope Mandrake and The Misfit present is that there is no evidence backing the fact that they weren't already down a path of a criminal, in fact there is more evidence suggesting they were always bad then not. Could such behaviour be resolved with a few more years to go? From Mandrake and The Misfit, we are told that the system dictates that we will never know. They had beliefs and morality, Mandrake even feels bad sometimes but the system shifts their beliefs to believing in nothing, believing that they cannot go back, believing that their life outside of prison is dead. Is that truly what causes villainy? A character being so far gone from the social contract that there is simply no room for them to return? Whether you believe this or not, no matter how