English Assignment: How Negative Emotions Affect Human Behavior

This English essay analyzes how negative emotions such as fear, anger, and betrayal affect human behavior and lead to irrationality and aggression, as portrayed in various literary works. The essay examines specific examples from W.D. Valgardson's short story 'A Matter of Chance,' where a character's life is drastically altered by past trauma, and from Timothy Findley's novel 'The Wars,' which depicts the experiences of a young soldier in a war setting. It also includes an analysis of Katherine Govier's short story 'The Dragon,' exploring how emotional attachments can influence a psychiatrist's behavior. The essay highlights how these narratives demonstrate the powerful impact of negative emotions on individuals and their actions, supported by references to the original texts.

Running head: ENGLISH ASSIGNMENT
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The topic – When afflicted with strong negative emotions such as fear, anger
or sense of betrayal, humans have the potential to be overcome by
irrationality and blind aggression. How is this scheme portrayal in the novel
and short stories throughout the course?
Certain negative emotions like anger, fear or any sense of betrayal strongly changes the
behaviour of a person. People turn to become more aggressive, their behaviour also changes and
it happens that people suddenly burst out with and violence. Writer W.D. Valgardson, in the
short story ‘A matter of chance’ uphold the character of a person who has suffered from a
stressful and a brutal past. The name of the character was Harold and his life got changed after
his wife was murdered brutally along with six fingers of her hand was broken. The children were
also much upset after the murder of their mother. Harold had to reach home early and had to
spent much time with them and for this he could only able to do job part time only.
Similarly in the novel ‘The war’, the Robert Ross is the main character who is a very
young 19 year old Canadian officer who went to the war. It was very difficult for such a young
soldier to act in such a battlefield. The whole battlefield was full of mud and smoke, of gas
chlorine and the smell of the rotten corpses but the young soldier fought very bravely and
desperately.
The same circumstances happened in the shirt story ‘the dragon’ by Katherine Govier,
also depicts the changes in the mind of a psychiatrist. It is the duty of the psychiatrist to treat the
mental patients but in this poem it is described that emotional attachment can even change the
mind of the psychiatrists also. The doctor in the given poem became so emotionally attached
with the patient that rather than treating him and helping him to recover from the problems, at the

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end it is seen that the psychiatrist even creates more problems so that the patient do not stop
visiting the psychiatrist.

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References
Findley, Timothy. Penguin Modern Classics the Wars. Penguin, 2016:1-224
Govier, Katherine. Katherine Govier Three-Book Bundle: Fables of Brunswick Ave., Three
Views of Crystal Water, and The Ghost Brush. HarperCollins, 2014:1-1152
Valgardson, William D. What Can't Be Changed Shouldn't Be Mourned. D & M Publishers,
2009:1-113.