Violence within literature contains substance and meaning beyond that witnessed merely on its outer surface layer. Authors employ a multitude of violent acts throughout literature, but each situation utilizes an array of symbols behind each of these circumstances. In today’s society violence often stems from spontaneous acts, not carefully crafted or analyzed events. However throughout literature, authors will purposefully inject violence into a story, to imply greater meaning. For example, Sethe, a desperate slave who is confined to a plantation with her child that she cannot help escape, kills her beloved youngster to save it from the tortures of slavery. This act of violence is symbolic of the brutal slave trade system and its victims of all forms. It also provides representation of the love Sethe held for her child, willing to take its life and send it to a better place, rather than have it suffer just as she has all of her life. Sethe’s “actions speak for the experience of a race at a certain horrific moment in history,” they do not stand merely as an act of violence.
Specific details throughout a story may appear as an accident within the cover, however “on the outside they’re planned, plotted, and executed” with adequate precision. Authors will carefully plan who survives and who does not within a story to add depth, as well as meaning to a piece. This tactic employed by authors, hooks the reader through suspense, but also engages their deeper mind to survey for greater symbolic meaning within the text. Most often these plotted violent attacks have been created with a multitude of meanings from the author. It is often hard to pinpoint the true connotation associate with a certain happening, but again this allows for reader’s evaluation and opinions to form. The use of violence throughout a story most often encourages deeper thinking and contains more significance than seen simply upon its surface.
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