“Everything you've worked for can go to waste with only one wrong decision.” ― Auliq Ice
In the short story “Leiningen Versus the Ants” by Carl Stephenson, Leiningen made the wrong decision and lost it all. The story follows a Brazilian plantation owner as he battles it out against the ants that are trying to take over and destroy his plantation. In the end, he came out the other side as the villain instead of the hero as he originally thought. Leiningen is the antihero of “Leiningen Versus the Ants” due to his selfish and egotistical personality, mass genocide of the ants and the morbid act of putting 400 innocent peons in mortal danger.
At the beginning of the short story Leiningen is warned that he should leave before the ants arrive, yet instead he decides to stay because he knew the ants could never defeat him. This shows that Leiningen is full of himself and very arrogant. Later on, Leiningen sends the women and children across the river to keep them out of the
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During the duration of the short story, Leiningen put the peons in danger countless times. Some of these situations even resulted in death, if Leiningen had simply left the plantation along with his workers they would not have died. A supporting quote is, “At length, two of the men’s nerves broke…But their fleetness did not save them; long before they could attain the rafts, the enemy covered their bodies from head to foot…Anything, even a fight midstream against alligators, seemed better than powerlessly waiting for death to come and slowly consume their living bodies”(Stephenson 15). This shows an example of the danger Leinigen put the peons in backfiring and making two of them break because they didn’t want to die and death seems better than the situation they were in. Once again, if Leiningen had just left this would not have