There is much violence in American literature, and it can range from person vs. nature to person vs. self. The many ways violence can form in literature can sometimes be very complex to the reader. In the three books I chose, violence plays a very important role in the making of the story. The definition of violence is the behavior involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something. In The Great Gatsby there’s a lot of violence.
In the beginning of chapter nine, Myrtle has just been killed by a hit and run and George, her husband, ends up going crazy. He says things such as “she couldn’t fool God”(Fitzgerald 159) and started to talk to himself. He was full of vengeance. In this craze he ends up thinking Gatsby killed his wife, and walks all the way to West Egg. As Gatsby is lying on an air mattress in his pool, George comes near and shoots him. Once Gatsby is dead George shoots and kills himself. George believed in “an eye for an eye”, this caused him to inflict violence upon Gatsby. The American population who read this started to conform into the belief of “an eye for an eye”. In this time that the book was published it wasn’t common for mass
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In Jack London’s To Build a Fire the story talks about a man and his dog traveling through a snow trail and it’s about 70 degrees below. The man becomes careless with his time and he ends up slowly freezing to death. His hands were getting so cold Jack London tells us he’s contemplating inflicting violence on his dog to keep warm by saying “He sat down in the snow, and in this fashion held the dog , while it snarled and whined and struggled… He realized he could not kill the dog. There was no way to do it. With his hands helpless he could neither draw nor hold his sheath-knife nor throttle the animal.” (London