Horrible Greed
Uploaded by altermann on Dec 15, 2001
A theme that always has been popular, specially among young people, is terror or the horror stories, there are many books, movies, TV shows, comics, and so on, but the most expressive, and imaginative, is literature. Literature since a long time ago, has produced many kinds of horror stories, novels, tales, short stories, plays, even poems, all of them with very different themes such as vampires, ghosts, leprecons, evil and estrange creatures. A characteristics of this themes is the fight between evil and good, the evil forces managed by the Devil against God's forces, but in some stories the Devil has no opponents, so he makes all he wants. One story of that kind is “the Devil and Tom Walker” ,wrote down by Irving Washington , in a time when religion and moral values were very important for people. Is about those values that the story talks about, a greedy man that can sell his soul for a gold coin, and only thinks in himself, there's no fight between Evil and Good, is a story about greed, and how it destroys our humanity.
Humanity, in this case, means all moral, cultural, and spiritual values of human race, that means the things that make us different from animals,but we always destroy our humanity , sometimes we behave worse than animals, fighting for a simple piece of paper. This behaviour is called greed, considered as a capital sin, greed has its origins since human kind , some people say the Devil, created the conception of property and money. Greed is older than man, we can say we created it, and now is out of control, mainly because of human nature, a very independent being, that makes what he wants. These elements converge in the story we mentioned, “The Devil and Tom Walker” in it the author shows the power of the Devil and greed.
The story takes place in a small town in the 1720's, in those times religion was very influent, and the need of money was too. That atmosphere is the perfect setting for a story about Devils and his powers over man, Devil was considered ,and still is, the author of all bad things, illness, sin, greed and so on. What Irving wanted, was to relate a story about the devil, but no as a protagonist, the main character is human kind represented by Tom Walker. This representation is quite exaggerated...