ipl-logo

Dystopia In Stephen King's The Running Man

709 Words3 Pages

Stephen King’s novel, “The Running Man”, describes a science fiction dystopia where capitalism and game shows have swirled out of control. Stephen King wrote this novel in the early 80s under the pseudonym name, Richard Bachman. King wanted to advance his way of writing and attempt a different style that required him to take a fictitious name. King wanted his new writing style to be in a different voice, and wanted to avoid criticism. Stephen King portrays “The Running Man” as a valiant dystopia with a strong streak of the 70s social radicalism. It is 2025, Television is the opium of the people. In a world where corruption erupts, people are divided into class structures, the poor and rich. Poor people live in Co-Op City, while rich people live in Uptown. Ben Richards is a 26 years old man, who is out of luck and has no job to support his family. Meanwhile, his daughter who is 18 months old, is infected with influenza and has respiratory problems. His wife resorts to prostitution to pay the bills and buy medicine for her ill daughter. Hopeless, Ben decides to participate in one of the Network’s Games, shows where the contestant can win extra money, or die trying. He is about to become a prey …show more content…

The majority of the players are there because of the government that has made it impossible for people to obtain the necessities needed to survive virtually. Nevertheless, the players voluntarily participate and voluntarily take the exams to qualify for the games. For instance, the people in Co-Op did not have a lot of jobs which resulted in participating on the Network’s Games. Another major point is that “The Running Man” criticizes the american educational system and standardized testing. In the novel, Ben is required to take several exams like the Verbal Comprehension, Visual Logic, and Math Diagnostic. In today’s world, students are required to take the SAT and ACT, which open doors for some people and exclude

Show More
Related

Of A History Of The SAT In 4 Questions By Cory Turner And Westervelt

230 Words | 1 Pages

In “A History Of The SAT In 4 Questions”, Cory Turner and Eric Westervelt write about the SAT and how it is changing. The authors discuss the new version of the SAT and how the College Board is going to change things. The Board “hopes the redesign will provide a more accurate measure of a student’s college and career readiness.” (Turner and Westervelt, A History Of The SAT). For example, Cyndie Schmeiser, the chief of assessment of the College Board, says that the new test “will include vocabulary, but within a reading passage.

Read More

Dystopian Affairs In Fahrenheit 451

1123 Words | 5 Pages

Dystopian Affairs Ray Bradbury’s depiction of a dystopia is interpreted through Guy Montag and his escape from society as well as Captain Beatty and his desire to get rid of books when they explore the technology and its advances in his novel, Fahrenheit 451. Born in a time of despair from the ongoing World War II, Bradbury fell in love with books as well as horror from a young age, and he enjoyed the sense of adventure it created (“Ray”). Bradbury uses “Fahrenheit 451 [as a reflection of his] lifelong love of books and his defense of the imagination against the menace of technology and government manipulation” (“Ray”), and bases his plots, characters, and themes on his past experiences and memories. World War II is a time period when literature was suddenly disappearing and technology became greatly significant. Realizing the troubles technology will create, Bradbury wrote stories based on dystopian affairs, including his most powerful novel, Fahrenheit 451.

Read More

Technology In John Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men

674 Words | 3 Pages

Of Mice and Men is a short novella by, John Steinbeck, detailing on the fear society carries for the unknown. Steinbeck 's novella touched on a subject most do not explore but led us on a journey of self reflec. Starting from the beginning John was born on on February 27, 1902, in Salinas, California, and died 1968 writing his best-selling novel in 1937. It was in highschool that Steinbeck found his passion for writing then went to college at Stanford until 1925 but never did he graduate. After leaving Stanford and hitting rough spots on the way it was with Of Mice and Men Steinbeck was becoming well known in his time with his book becoming a popular and critical success, was selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club.

Read More

Summary Of Americans Challenges With Health Care Costs By Alex Montero

1206 Words | 5 Pages

In this game, the contestants are hunted down by those trying to kill them, while they are trying to survive and win a cash prize. Ben chose to go on the game to win the cash prize to send back to his wife in order to help his child. He is trying to go as a far as possible in the game in order to help his family. While Ben is at home with his wife, Sheila, he asks Sheila, “‘You’ll take the money? … You won’t do anything stupid?”

Read More

Discrimination Present In John Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men

2032 Words | 9 Pages

Discrimination Present in Of Mice and Men John Steinbeck was born at the beginning of the twentieth century and experienced the turning point of many eras that are evidenced throughout his writings. Steinbeck lived through the strong economic years during World War I, the dirt poor years of the Great Depression, and even saw the beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s; all of his dreams for these decades are evidenced in his works, more specifically, Of Mice and Men. Of Mice and Men is set in the 1920’s in the Salinas Valley of California. Other writers, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, char-acterize the 1920’s as a fun decade with a booming economy filled with men rising from rags to riches, but Steinbeck shows how life was for men

Read More

Stephen King's 'The Running Man'

1351 Words | 6 Pages

Stephen King’s “The Running Man” is a very tough book to summarise. There are many things that happen throughout it, but due to the nature of the situation, in the end everything around Ben Richards gets destroyed, causing many things that may seem to be key events to have very little impact on the ending of the story. The basic story, removing all of these elements, is that a man named Ben Richards is living an impoverished life in some random town in the U.S., and signs up for a death game called The Running Man to make a whole bunch of money so he can get his daughter’s pneumonia treated. The whole idea of The Running Man is that a man goes on the run for 30 days from the authorities and a group of people called the hunters who are chasing

Read More

The Running Man Analysis

1593 Words | 7 Pages

The Running Man The running man is the fourth novel written by the Stephen King/ Richard Bechman in 1982, highlighting the miseries of dystopia of the American world. This novel is the fourth writing material out of his seven scripts which embodies the harsh realities of the second half of the twentieth century. The main theme of this novel is the “survival of the poor”. In this novel he went through his pseudonym, Richard Beckman that he often uses in most of his sad or pessimistic stories, the man aged 28 who tries hard for the survival of himself and his family but all the efforts gone in vain (Murphy). In this story the author writes about the Ben Richard, who is an unemployed individual permanently belong to an underclass family.

Read More

The Other Wes Moore Critical Analysis

1254 Words | 6 Pages

Despite an increase of education scores in the past decade, the United States still trenches behind many countries. Scores found in the Programme for International Student Assessment, the most popular cross sectional test, finds that the United State ranks thirty-eight out of seventy-one countries in test performances of english, math and science literary. But within the country itself contains a deeper issue. The term “achievement gap” is used to describe the polarity between the academic performances of minorities, such as Black and Hispanics, to those of Asians and White students; which are found to be much lower than the latter. Besides test scores, this achievement gap is most apparent in grades and drop-out rates as well.

Read More

Argumentative Essay On ACT And SAT Scores

729 Words | 3 Pages

As students start their senior year of high school there are many changes in their life. This is the time of a student’s life when they decide what they want to do after they graduate high school. Students can decide to join the military, work, or continue their education at a college or university. For the students who continue their education they have many things to do before they finally get accepted. A common step they take is taking the The American College Test (ACT) and the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT).

Read More

The Pros And Cons Of The SAT

1241 Words | 5 Pages

SATS and ACTS have been used for numerous years as a way to gauge a student’s academic success while in college. Students have the choice which test they would prefer to take and most colleges do not prefer one test over the other. There are a few key differences between the SAT and ACT, which may make one test more suitable than the other for those taking the tests. Many studies have proven that the SAT and ACT are not the best judge of future success, and that colleges should focus their applications more on past grades and accomplishments to decide which students should be accepted to their university. SATs and ACTs are not an effective measure of college readiness and future academic success.

Read More

Standardized Testing Bias

1523 Words | 7 Pages

They argue that the real issue lies with the fact that colleges rely too heavily on the SAT in admission decisions. Scores of studies have shown that the SAT and ACT are poor indicators of students’ future success in college. Despite this, many colleges will still use these tests to weed out students who scored low, students that they predict will perform poorly in college, regardless of their levels of achievement, academic or otherwise, outside of standardized testing. This results in high numbers of students of color, who traditionally score lower on standardized tests, getting left out of the admissions process - because they’re being predicted not to do

Read More

Argumentative Essay: Should The SAT Determine Your Future

483 Words | 2 Pages

The exam was formerly constructed in the 1920s to measure "American Inteligence", so that smart white males can be put into recognized institutions such as Harvard. Today the SAT is used in college admissions. Because of the time period,The Authors didn’t take account racial diversity. Not only is the SAT biased to non-white test takers, but also to the

Read More

Standardized Testing Research Paper

895 Words | 4 Pages

Standardized tests are very common in today’s modern society. They are used as a tool to measure a person’s performance and indicate how their estimated performance will be in a college class. Every year hundreds of students take the ACT or SAT in order to get accepted into their college of choice and to receive scholarships, but they fail to see the problems with these standardized tests. As more and more people take these tests, the national average score falls causing doubt in the extremely important system. This is leading people to question whether or not the ACT and SATs are accomplishing what they were created to do.

Read More

Examples Of Dystopia In The Maze Runner

1735 Words | 7 Pages

Dystopian literature would focus on the ruined society and it was important and hard to survive. James Dashner in his novel “The Maze Runner” tested the youngsters’ brain to seek their future in the middle of the pressure. The youngsters alone had to survive with their limited possibilities. Thomas, one of the teenagers helped the other to solve the maze and to escape the glade. With the arrival of Thomas in Glade, the life of the Gladers is explained.

Read More

Argumentative Essay On Standardized Testing

1098 Words | 5 Pages

This method will prevent students from gaining the knowledge they seek and will not work to their advantage later on in the future. Most high school classes are teaching students how to take tests rather than teaching them how to skilfully answer them and master them. This causes students to enter college and university unprepared as they develop little skill-making abilities. High-stake standardized testing, such as the SAT, is burdensome for students. The standardized test scores that a student receives determine which university a student can attend and this greatly impacts his or her future.

Read More

More about Dystopia In Stephen King's The Running Man

Related Topics

Open Document