Living things are all around the world—they fly in the sky, walk along the ground, swim in the water, and can be so small someone may never even see them. Most people probably do not spend much time pondering the lives of living things other than humans. Some people may even disregard the life of things that are not human. However, because they are living things, and life is precious in all forms, living things, human or not, deserve some amount of respect and sanctity. In “A Brutal Murder in a Public Place” (rpt. in Greg Johnson and Thomas R. Arp, Perrine’s Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense, 12th ed. [Boston: Wadsworth, 2015] 517-521), Joyce Carol Oates uses a strange and unexpected shift in point of view to emphasize the living things in the story in order to reveal how people view non-human living things as trivial and unimportant, even though those non-humans are living things just like humans, deserving of the same treatment, and ultimately to describe the ambiguity between humans and non-human livings things and thus exhibit the inhumanity of the improper view of non-human living things.…show more content… “A Brutal Murder in a Public Place” illustrates how people should properly view other living things. Oates denounces the irreverent and brutal treatment of non-human living things using a shift in point of view. Through this shift, Oates describes how all living things remain equal, both human and non-human. After emphasizing the idiosyncrasy of living things within the random non-living of the airport, the author transforms a human narrator into a bird, revealing the parallels of living things; because all living things stand as equals, people should treat them equally. Oates describes the sanctity and preciousness of all living things through the sudden shift in point of view, telling her audience that people should not disregard the lives of living things just because they are not
