By: Lucas
What does it mean to be a human being? There is still no definite answer, only ideas of what it truly means. In Roald Dahl’s perspective of humanity, humans are weak willed because they can easily lose to their emotions. People who are weak willed lack the ability to restrain their negative impulses. Nobody is perfect, which is why we sometimes act upon what is on our mind unconsciously. When this happens, the actions we do are not logical or in other words, not what we should have done. The main characters in “The Umbrella Man”, “Man from the South” and “Lamb to the Slaughter” all display weak will in different ways which shows us that there are many ways for us to become weak willed. In the story “The Umbrella Man”, the mother loses her pride, which she values a …show more content…
2, par. 4). This suggests that she could have been tricked by someone similar to him because it is strange to suspect someone who you have never met before. When this same man wanted her to buy “his” silk umbrella for a pound, when the actual price, as he had stated, was “over twenty pounds” (pg. 4, par, 10), it was clearly too good to be true, and it was logical for the mother to be suspicious. Instead, she ignored this fact and followed her greed, which then lead to her downfall. You could see that she chose to follow her greed rather than be logical, because she “began to melt a bit” (par. 4, par. 5) from this offer and then she acted on her impulse or couldn’t control herself. The mother reacted like this because she would have benefited a lot from it by agreeing to the deal. Here, Roald Dahl is mentioning that we can’t control ourselves if we were in a situation like this, so it proves that our greed is causing the weak will. After she accepted the deal, she told her daughter, “I wanted to satisfy myself he wasn’t a trickster” (pg. 5, par. 6), and this sentence suddenly shows how she