✨“Instinct is no match for reason.”✨
Published in 1924, Richard Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game” is about Sanger Rainsford, a hunter, who’s on a hunt in the Amazon River basin. Suddenly, he hears three gunshots and in order to understand where it is coming from, he hoists himself up on the rails. Unfortunately, he slips and falls off the ship and swims towards the sound of the gunshots, to an abandoned and isolated island in the Caribbean.
Rainsford decides to rest for the night and searches for a safe place. The next day, when he wakes up and wanders around on the island, he finds an abandoned rifle and some footprints beside it. He followed the footsteps and he found a huge door. He bangs on the door and a man named Ivan who lets Rainsford in. Here, Rainsford meets General Zaroff. Zaroff is warm and welcoming, asking Ivan to show Rainsford to a guest room and inviting him to dinner later. The General’s house is filled with mounted animal heads, from his hunting adventures all around the world. And when Rainsford praises the General, he dismisses it simply and replies that hunting animals had become easy, so now he hunts far dangerous animals that could reason.
Rainsford is horrified when he slowly realizes that the general hunts humans. Zaroff simply states that Rainsford will not find it bewildering once he tries his hands at it. Rainsford declines and goes to bed but General's truth kept him up at night. He awoke when he heard distant gunshots.
Upon return, Zaroff states that the sailors he hunts are timid and hunting them is now boring. Shocked, Rainsford demands to leave but Zaroff challenges him in a sadistic victory by death hunt and gives him a head start. After three days of chasing and hiding, Rainsford is finally free.
One of the main themes of the story is the triumph of good over evil. It was inevitable that Rainsford had to be alive at the end of the story. The short story also cleverly adds to the philosophical thought that reason is better than instinct- Zaroff’s manners and behaviour are animalistic and are based on instinct; he becomes like the animals he hunted. Whereas Rainsford is seen as the hero because he employs his human intellect to save himself.
With brilliant writing and by using pellucid symbols such as the jungle to represent the chaotic and bestial nature of Zaroff, Connell invites you to be a spectator of the actions happening in the story but the plot as such was bland. The chase and the ending were thrilling, but the story seemed far too long. One of the most disappointing aspects was how much the writer tries to fit into the story- most of the beginning feels like fillers, the important part of the story is shortened and the whole structure feels imbalanced. Had the story been written in the format of a novella or had the writer deleted unwanted parts and highlighting the important ones, it would have been spectacular.
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