Judge, Jury, and Executioner

Allright, so this was probably my fault for not being clear about our presentation today, my bad, but here is something that I thought about the passages that we talked about today. I felt that these passages contained a theme that is present throughout most of the novel. The theme is that people seem to often miss apply a false sense of authority, or rather, they make judgements and actions hastily based on what they believe to be true about what they're doing, and what they believe is true about what other people are doing or will do, and end up making a mistake and regretting it. Take for example the man who kicks the pigeon. If the man was being honest, that he assumed that the pigeon was just going to fly away, then he demonstrates that people in the novel act without thinking, based on some assumption that they take to be true at the time, and cause destruction, death, and other problems. The man believes the pigeon will fly away, he believes this gives him the right to kick, his assumption turns out to be wrong, the pigeon dies, and he is hated by those around him. 

Merely sticking to humans interacting with the animal world, this occurs again when Paul and Jimmy notice two pairs of grasshoppers mating among the swarm. They instantly judge the creatures based on their size and assume that the two pairings are "grotesque", and Paul decides that it is his responsibility to "correct" this flaw in nature. And yet, even after he and Jimmy have successfully switched the two pairs so that they match up more in size, the bigger with the bigger, smaller with smaller, the way in which the one on top then switches with the one on top indicates that, in doing so, they may have actually pared them incorrectly, and that they may have, in the process of "correcting" a perceived flaw in nature, they may have ended up creating another one.

But these interactions of the human world botching up the animal world also relates to how the human characters have been acting towards each other. even from the very beginning when Molly, Anna, and Richard are discussing what's"best" for Tommy we see that these people are constantly forcing their own opinions and what they believe to be correct on others, and on many occasions, such as when Tommy ends up putting the three to shame when they try to tell him what's best for him, or how Anna and Molly lament that their time in the party was a waste of time. And the fact that this happens in the beginning of the novel, as well as in the Black notebook, if the notebook is to be believed, shows that Anna has done this multiplt times without ever having learned her lesson.