Bedtime Story Analysis

In “Bedtime Story” by George MacBeth, he demonstrates the dumb violence of humans. Our primal, mindless habits to hurt lead to the destruction of ourselves and other species. Many times, when humans hate or fear an animal for hurting them, it only acted in self-defense, but people look for excuses to take out their anger from everyday stresses on other living things. MacBeth demonstrates the idiotic and primal nature of our violence by using a tribal human character, and shows our needless violence in the human’s hunting habits and mannerisms. To portray a message of peace, he compares humans to a kind alien race much like bees, which we consider hurtful pests. He also shows the unfairness in our violence with a race that respects humans even …show more content…
“Earlier men had disposed of, for pleasure |Creatures whose names we scarcely remember - | Zebra, rhinoceros, elephants, wart-hog, | Lion, rats, deer. But” MacBeth uses the term ‘disposed of’ because it doesn’t have an association with hunting. It is one way to say ‘kill’ that is disconnected from the ‘sport’ of hunting animals, so when the reader sees it, they do not think of it as hunting. He does this because hunting is considered acceptable by many people, if reluctantly by some. MacBeth wants to portray the horror of hunting and expose the emotional arrow it should pierce through people’s hearts. He added ‘for pleasure’ as an afterthought, because the species telling this history is one that would assume we had a reason. Overpopulation that would destroy the environment, for example. The tone of the first line there is that of a parent telling a young child an interesting fact; it is unique to them to kill living things at all, much less without good reason. It is a foreign idea to murder for pleasure. MacBeth opens the continuing section with ‘Creatures whose names we scarcely remember-‘ which sets up for a list of exotic or special animals. It makes the reader expect a list of grandeur. MacBeth does open with such names, animals centralized in Africa where more tribal villages are. These animals are connected to those people. From the point of view of people in cities or larger towns, these …show more content…
We think of tribal humans as violent or animalistic, which in itself shows animalism in us, and MacBeth highlights the fact that a group of people in New York are much like an isolated tribe in the Congo in some ways. He calls the cities extinguished in the exerpt “After the wars extinguished the cities”. This word’s association and sound portrays a city being completely destroyed and wiped of life. The very people that likely prayed for destruction of the enemy, cheered at their political leader’s speech, and viewed the other side as evil, put out their own cities. MacBeth shows betrayal and hatred toward people we should be caring for. He does not point out any individual city, but speaks of all cities as a whole; he communicates that we are all humans, and where we live, what we think, or should not separate us emotionally or pit us against each other. People in cities are viewed as normal and human since they are civilized, however, MacBeth showed that all humans are still people regardless of their way of life. His comments next, “Only the wild ones were left, half-naked | Near the Equator: and here was the last one,” MacBeth describes the human as ‘wild’ and ‘half-naked’ to show negativity in people. Wild refers to wild animals, inhuman and primally violent. Naked shows ignorance in not knowing to put on clothes, even though they don’t make sense here, and creates