Two Forces in Human Nature Reign - Essay Example

At first, he seems nothing more than a cold-blooded killer, but when he talks about himself to the grandmother, he shows himself to be emotionally confused. He doesn't understand why he was sent to the penitentiary in the first place, and he even compares himself to Jesus, who also didn't know why he was punished. He seems to think that if you can't be sure whether Jesus did the great things he claimed, like raising the dead, or you just don't believe it, then there's no pleasure but meanness, and you may as well kill people, burn their houses down or whatever.

Why he should think this is hard to say, but it just seems no more than an excuse for him to lash out at a world that, he believes, has treated him so cruelly. The passion that rules him is a cold, hard passion for revenge. In 'The Secret Sharer', the newly-appointed captain of a ship, who is clearly a thoughtful and reasonable person, encounters a man who has escaped from another ship after having killed someone in a fit of anger. Perhaps surprisingly, the captain takes pity on the stranger and hides him in his cabin.

This is partly explained by the fact that the stranger and the captain look alike and are even dressed alike, so that the captain, who is the narrator of the story, thinks of the stranger as his double. He also seems to admire the stranger in some way in spite of the passion that led the stranger to commit his crime. It is as if he envies the stranger for his more reckless and less restrained behavior. In turn, the captain takes on some of that recklessness by hiding the stranger from the rest of his crew and assisting him in a bold escape from his ship.

In doing this, the captain puts the ship, his crew, and himself in danger, as he sails very close to an island that the stranger intends to swim to. However, his powers of reason assert themselves in the end, and he is able to use the stranger's escape to good effect, using his floating cap as a guide to navigating the ship into safer waters. The Dark Half is a nightmarish story about good and evil in which a writer and his family are threatened by a creature of his own making, a less restrained 'twin' of the writer, who was more or less invented by him as a way of channeling his writing energies.

The unrestrained George Stark writes very very nasty stories which are enormously popular, but the writer, Thad Beaumont, as well as his wife Liz, is very disturbed by his own creation and tries to 'bury' him. It doesn't work, and the evil Stark rises from the grave and goes on a rampage of murder and mayhem. His main aim is to get Beaumont to write more stories under Stark's name, to ensure his survival, but Beaumont resists this. The longer Beaumont resists, the more Stark begins to fall apart physically, though somehow he is able to maintain such superhuman strength as to kill policemen and anybody else that stands in his way, as easily as swatting flies.

In the end, there is a showdown between Beaumont and Stark, a seesawing battle of wits which eventually Beaumont wins with the help of the world's sparrows, who peck the unfortunate and very unreasonable Stark to bits. In all of these tales, the 'good' characters, such as the grandmother, the captain, and Beaumont, have their moments of passion, but they're all restrained by reason. They are contrasted with characters of a more desperate nature, characters whose passions have taken them over the edge of reason.

In this way, the stories portray very graphically the choices available, and the consequences of making the wrong choice.