Summary Of The Most Dangerous Game By Thomas C. Foster

“It may pay to remember this: there’s no such thing as a completely original work of literature”(Foster 26). How To Read Literature Like A Professor: For Kids is a great book by Thomas C. Foster that explains to young readers about how an instructor interprets literature differently than a student. He does this by showing examples from other books and famous literature. Some of the things he talks about are quests, weather and symbols, irony, and vampirism. These examples can be seen throughout The Most Dangerous Game; a book written by Richard Connell about a man who gets trapped on an island. Foster states that every trip in a work of literature is a quest. In The Most Dangerous Game, Rainsford is the quester, “a person who goes on a quest”(Foster 7). His original quest was to go and hunt jaguar in the Caribbean, but he ended up swimming to an island named Ship-Trap Island. On the island, his new quest was to survive being hunted by General Zaroff, a man who lures people to his island to be hunted like animals. All of the challenges and trials that Rainsford has to triumph over are all part of the quest. Many other books also have it where the main quest is interrupted by a side quest. In The Most

A great example of verbal irony is when General Zaroff states that the island is “a most-restful spot”(60). Although the General tells the truth about it being a restful place, what he really meant was that sailors will rest there forever. Another presence of irony is in the beginning of the story. Rainsford was the hunter and did not care for the feelings of the animals he hunted. He ended up being the “hunted” and finally understood how they felt. He had a change in opinion for the animals. One more example from the text is when Zaroff states that Ivan is “a bit of a savage”(57). This shows that Zaroff thinks of himself not a savage even though he is the one slaughtering