Selfishness In Frankenstein

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Inherent Selfishness, a theme that you don’t commonly hear of, has shown up in multiple 20th century stories. 20th century stories such as Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness, Greene’s “The Destructors”, and Orwell’s “Shooting An Elephant” all portray this rarely used theme in the characters. Each story has different content, but all of them lead back to the same problem of people being inherently selfish. The characters show their selfishness through their roles in the stories.

In the first story Heart Of Darkness, Conrad implies the theme of inherent selfishness through the main character Kurtz. Kurtz shows his inner selfishness through his brutality toward the natives, and through his greed for his beloved ivory and other possessions. In one case, The Manager told Marlow that he overheard Kurtz talking about his ivory and said, “My intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my ---” (Conrad 48). The Manager went on and said that he was saying those things as if he owned everything that moved. Kurtz was even so selfish that he pretty much worked by himself to keep the hiding …show more content…
The Officer showed his inner selfishness through his thoughts that were included in the short story. An act of greediness occurred when he had the choice to shoot the rampant elephant or let it live. He chose to shoot the elephant to please the natives and to save the image that people saw him as. If he would’ve not been selfish and chose to let the elephant live he would’ve been frowned upon by the people and his peers. He revealed his reason for choosing to shoot in a thought which he had asked himself, “I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.” (Orwell 1326). The Officer symbolizes a lot of people in today’s society and how they will do things to protect their self image and how other people see them and think of

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AP Lang Frankenstein Essay

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