Sympathy Vs. Empathy In The Rattler

Bloody, vicious, and gut wrenching deaths occur frequently across the world. Human often contribute to the demise of various living things in order to ensure their own survival. People capture and execute animals for nourishment and protection. In the short story “The Rattler,” a man must decide whether or not to spare the life of a rattlesnake that he encounters during a walk in the desert. He chooses to slaughter the snake, resulting in the snake’s gory death. The author convinces the audience to sympathize with the snake and empathize with the narrator through the characterization of the snake, the descriptions of the tranquil environment, and the perspective of the man.

“The Rattler” portrays the narrator’s moral conflict between his sense of duty to other people and his respect for all life through diction and anthropomorphism.

At least once in their life, people make a decision, and grow to eventually regret what they have done and reflect on what could have been done instead. In the passage “The Rattler” the speaker recalls the time when he crosses paths with a snake and has to debate whether to kill the snake. The author invites the reader to feel empathy for the man and sympathy for the snake using the point of view of the man, attitude of the snake, and descriptions of the setting.

The author's literary techniques used in "The Rattler" portray a feeling of sadness and regret. A human has come across a snake, in the snake’s natural habitat. For the sake of human safety the snake must die. The reader becomes sympathetic for the man and his choice to save himself and others. The man also shows a sense of humility when he chooses to leave the rattlers on the snake. He could have chosen to keep these as proof of his heroic actions, however he chose to spare the snake’s own self-respect as if he had lived, ” I did not cut the rattles off for a trophy; I let him drop into the close green guardianship of the paper-bag bush.”

Abbey is an animal lover and he described how two snakes were by his feet he had the opportunity to shoot them but decided against it. “ It is

Connections to the reader’s own life and understanding for the hardships of the characters in the book are easily made, as the characters are fleshed out and

Empathy is a quality difficult to attain. Not many people can really look through the eyes of someone else most of us are sympathetic. Empathy is almost a rare feeling how often are you going to feel empathy for the syrian refugees or children in Africa? It’s hard to feel empathy for things that we haven't experienced. But in every bundle of people their is an Atticus Finch.

In the two poems Sympathy by Paul Laurence Dunbar and Caged Bird by Maya Angelou, gave a comparison between the life of a caged bird and the life of a slave. There are similarities and differences in the two poems. The difference between the two poem is that Sympathy is more aggressive than the poem Caged Bird, and the similarities of the two poems is the theme and imagery.

These two phrases subtly hint at the man's slowly increasing insanity and foreshadow his mental break later in the

Throughout the story, three major details of the narrator’s psyche are confirmed. First, we learned of the narrator’s deceitfulness. Every morning he lies to the old man with the least bit of guilt. The next continues to prove the madness as the narrator feels utter joy from the terror of another. Lastly, the narrator fabricates that the old man is simply not home to assure the officers.

While his opinion is abundantly clear, he intelligently and craftily builds exceedingly relatable analogies for the reader. He tees the unsuspecting reader off with a light

(26) The simile “like a whiff from some corpse” can be interpreted to be a literal reference to the death of elephants and native people that result from the ivory trade. The sense of decay that is created by the simile also reflects the moral degradation that results from greed. Similarly, in Dante’s Inferno, the Master remarks that “the undiscerning life that made them filthy now renders them unrecognizable.” (VII.

He has a kind heart and good intentions, but he cannot convey his message properly. Speaks to me: I think the issue of not being able to express thoughts in a proper way is a problem much larger than presented in this book. Many people, including myself, feel a certain way about a subject or individual, but we cannot express how we feel in a manner that properly reflects our feelings. Specifically, many people

By dividing the book into two parts he is able to really explain

Without this insight the narrator would be painted as a true badass, instead of the poser that he truly