The Most Dangerous Game By: Richard Connell

483 Words2 Pages
Notable big-game hunter Sanger Rainsford was aboard a yacht traveling to the Amazon Rainforest with his companion Whitney to hunt jaguar. Rainsford hears gunshots in the distance and foolishly decides to climb on the ship’s rail. He drops his pipe and falls off the boat trying to retrieve it. After he realizes that he cannot swim back to the boat, he determinedly swims to Ship-Trap Island. When he makes it to land he instantaneously falls into a deep slumber, the currents of the sea drained most of his energy. Following previous tracks, Rainsford is directed to a château. Here he meets General Zaroff, a civilized man with a passion for the hunt. He tells Rainsford that he hunts big quarry on the island that he has imported, since no other animal could reason like the one he hunts. With horror Rainsford realized that General Zaroff actually hunts humans. With this General Zaroff forces Rainsford to be hunted by him. The Most Dangerous Game is a good piece of literature. Countless elements that create a story are used by the author. Examples of personification are, “He struggled up to the surface and tried to cry out, but the wash from the speeding yacht slapped him in the face.” "Well done, your Burmese tiger trap claimed one of my best dogs! Again you score..." Connell also shows many points of irony in this short story. The first being the Rainsford, a hunter, become the hunted. Also, he didn’t care much about the prey that he hunted and how they felt, but in the end he realized how the animal at bay felt. Lastly, the setting Ship-Trap Island, is used by general means to trap ships. An example of a metaphor, “Those fishy blue eyes held a look I never saw there before.” The moonless Caribbean night was described by using this simile, “Ugh! It’s like moist black velvet.” This sentence gave a sense of imagery, “The night crawled by like a wounded snake.”One other
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