I was surprised to find all these old essays. Since I lost most motivation to write anything serious or funny due to my recent mental breakdown, this makes up for all essays I promised to do but actually never did. Most of these essays are crap (they were written for English class sometime back, mostly on "smart" movies) and should be used as evidence against how school degrades the human spirit. It'd be nice to actually write the aforementioned promised essays. Yeah whatever... Oh yeah, if you are the teacher's class and want to use these essays, don't be a fucking idiot. These are probably cached by search engines. Oh wait nevermind, Google hates my site and doesn't even get ranked first (or sometimes not even top ten) for it's own goddamn name. Go ahead and plagiarize. Use the "Table of Contents" links below to navigate easily within this page.
12 Angry Men || 2001: A Space Odyssey || Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb || Citizen Kane || One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest || Huckleberry Finn and Jim || Physco || Opech or: How I Wrote the Worst Essay in the World
[This essay is just terrible.]
The movie depicts jury deliberations in a murder case. It is an unbearably hot day, the case seems clear, and so everybody expects a quick decision. The preliminary vote though is 11 to 1 to convict the Puerto Rican boy who is accused of the murder of his father. Although twelve different personalities clash during very tense and intensely emotional scenes, all with different experiences, biases and prejudices, the main conflict is developing between Juror 8 (Henry Fonda's character) and Juror 3. Juror 8 has the only dissenting vote at the preliminary vote and he keeps his position all the time, while Juror 3 is becoming his main challenger who holds his position till the very end.
The jurors are strikingly different personalities with one common character: they are not open-minded. One of them is clearly prejudiced against the boy based on his social background. Another juror (a clown) would prefer to reach a quick verdict just not to miss a baseball game. Juror 7 is simple stupid.
It is only Juror 8 (Davis) who takes his obligation as a juror "seriously", that is, exactly the way the law expects to do. The law requires the prosecution to prove the defendant's guilt "beyond a reasonable doubt". Although Davis concedes that he himself is not convinced that the boy is innocent, he still sticks to his position and tries to plant the seeds of "reasonable doubt" in his fellow jurors.
During this process, both Jurors 8 and 3 form alliances from the other jurors, who all have some reasons at the beginning to believe in the guilt of the defendant. It turns out, however, that their beliefs are not based on facts and they are not able to defend their positions. Davis comes up with a series of doubts in regard to the prosecution's proofs including the handicaps of the eyewitnesses and the use of the unique knife to stab a person. That makes the jurors revise and change their positions. Jurors 8 and 3, however, do not change their former opinions. At some point, mainly from tactics, Davis offers that he will revise his standpoint if all the other eleven remain resolute. Davis, who is an architect, builds his case of winning his fellow jurors over with clear logic and persuading arguments. He does not want to prove that anyone is wrong, he simply wants to get the others to acknowledge this possibility.
During this evolving process, juror 3 reveals more and more about himself, his son, and his feelings about him. It is becoming more and more obvious that where his prejudice comes from: his fatally messed-up relationship with his son, who is the same age as the defendant. It becomes clear that he projects all of his anger, helplessness, and humiliation to the defendant. He wants to take a revenge on his son who left him two years ago. In the climax at the end of the film, as the last juror, Juror 3 finally gives up his former position and helps the jury reach a unanimous verdict. By then we see a broken man, and witness to his transformation from a aggressive, bullish, brutish and angry person into a deeply human figure who finally deserves our sorrow.
Interestingly enough, during the same process Juror 8 does not reveal anything from his personal life. We do not know anything about his past, former experiences, or motivations. When we admire his leadership qualities, we are wondering why he feels it is important to give a chance to the defendant by carefully evaluating the evidences while the other eleven jurors do not? All of his motives remain obscure. I think that leaving Henry Fonda's character somewhat astract and general, the catharsis we feel at Juror 3's breakdown even more intense.
A wide spectrum of human characters is displayed in the film. The jurors are presented as fallible, ordinary men with weaknesses, human faults, and prejudices. Two characters are in the center of the drama. The consistency of one helps the jury reach a conscientious (but not necessarily just) verdict, and helps the other to dig his soul and admit himself his former mistakes.
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[The only thing that would make this movie better is me not writing this shit. It truly degrades the movie.]
2001: A Space Odyssey is truly one of the finest films ever created by Stanley Kubrick. Not only is it spectacular because of the special effects that rival even today's computer-generated movies, but also it can be called a great film because of the cunningly subtle way Kubrick decided to portray and express his themes. Although there are literally thousands of ways of interpreting the themes for 2001, this essay will leave that up to those who rather not indulge upon the creative beauty of Kubrick's genius subtleness and symbolism. While the film sneakily hides the real themes, Kubrick wisely chose portraying future events to attract people to see his movie. Kubrick uses basic ideas drawn up from Greek mythology to set forth his themes.
Although 2001 could be dismissed as a terrible movie, or at best, inaccurate, due to its completely incorrect predictions. However, Kubrick did not intend upon becoming a fortuneteller. He wanted to show the world, which would be attracted to his film because of people's want to know about the future, his take and interpretations on things. The film leaves this interpretation very ambiguous and rather confusing. Even Kubrick himself refused to talk about his own themes for 2001. So, we are left to analyze the way he concealed his themes through the use of mythology.
As the film's title might suggest, it's roots come from Greek mythology. Kubrick's symbolism fully comes out right in the Dawn of Man scene when one of the four black monoliths of the film greets one of the tribes of the apes. The black monolith can be seen as a divine intervention that brings new knowledge or the insight to begin to gain knowledge. After it's appearance, the monkeys gain insight into a new technology: a stick that can be used to beat things with, most notably the members of the rival tribe. The story of Prometheus could be paralleled and related because he was the one who brought fire to man. However, the fire does not directly relate to the stick, but rather, as fire was used to create all sorts of new technologies for man, the stick is just the first technology in the line of inventions for man that eventually leads to next scene and new technology: space flight and the super-smart computer, HAL-9000. Also, the results of Prometheus's actions and of the monolith are similar, though symbolism is only surface deep: the introduction and eventual advancement of technology, someway or other, brings about misery to humankind. In Prometheus case, this can be seen in Pandora's box and how disease and misery spreads around the world. In 2001, the technology advances to such a level that humanity is outwitted by the genius HAL-9000 computer. (Coincidentally, or probably not, the planet to be explored for the astronauts is Jupiter, the Roman name for Zeus, the god who punished Prometheus!)
This symbolism in mythology can be taken a step further for even more stealthy symbolism, although we must forget about Prometheus. Dave miraculously saves himself from the villainous and all-powerful HAL-9000 by disconnecting him. This appears to be the same story line when Odysseus saves himself and escapes with his remaining crew from the brute one-eyed cyclops son of Poseidon. They both overcome great obstacles and are both saved from near impossible situations, using the human ingenuity to outwit something that is more powerful than they.
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[This perhaps is my favorite movie. For the time I put into it, it's a good essay.]
The late Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove cleverly combines the Cold War's mad obsession with nuclear weapons with subtle, ironic comedy. I believe that Peter Sellers's tri-character performance clearly improves this. His three characters: President Merkin Muffley, Captain Lionel Mandrake, and ex-Nazi Dr. Strangelove enhances this actually very gloomy subject to a satirical comedy. However, the closer viewer also notices that the grave seriousness of the subject does not simply vanish just because of the touch of witty humor. Instead Seller's "tri-personalities" act as a report card not to judge how well each of the three basic personalities (id, ego, superego) adapt to different settings, but to show which personality would rule in a time of crisis.
The superego of Seller's three characters is the President, Merkin Muffley. The superego, or the unconscious censors and restrains, like a parent. When the Muffley speaks with the Russian Premier, although Kissoff is drunk, he sounds very condescending and tells the premier not to jump to conclusions in a voice as if he was talking to a small child.
The "middle" personality, ego, is the British Captain Lionel Mandrake. Although he is a trained soldier, he does not let his soldier instincts in his way. When he does not have enough change to place a call to the Pentagon, he orders Bat Guano to shoot at the Coca-Cola machine to get the change. Also, when the lunatic General Ripper closes the door on them, Mandrake does not simply just follow the general's instructions, but instead tries clever ways of not only opening the door but also to get the recall code to the Pentagon.
The id, the unrestrained free spirit, in the movie has to be Dr. Strangelove. His completely anti-conformist idea of having ten females to one male for mating purposes after the Doomsday Holocaust shows him without a regard for any reasonable ideas in society. His lack of caring for any individual by being generalizing humanity awards him with self-destructive id.
The movie itself does not clearly answer the question raised, so we will have to answer it ourselves indirectly by looking at the cut out part of the movie. We can assume that Dr. Strangelove's plan for living in the mineshafts and its mating habits are realized since no other alternative is raised. However, just because Dr. Strangelove's idea is agreed upon does not secure him a winner. So we must look at the lost "pie scene." The pie fight is not between the ambassador and the Americans, but rather the different parts of the armed services. After being incapacitated by a pie, the President sits down and starts building a pie castle with the Russian ambassador. The armed services are reunited when General Turgidson calls for Dr. Strangelove to become the President. The cream less Dr. Strangelove unites everyone by his crazed ideas and thus the id becomes the winner of this chaotic power struggle.
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[Another great movie ruined by an incoherent essay.]
After thoroughly watching Citizen Kane, I felt some intense emotions against Charles Kane. I not only felt that he died miserably lonely, but still in the illusion of, or perhaps just want of, the selfish ruler of all as himself. Of course, Kane was not the master of all since he died and failed to overcome life's antithesis. His last word of Rosebud sparked many light bulbs in my head, but I did not know if my ideas were remotely "correct," for a lack of a better word. So to find out what it meant, or rather, what others thought of it, I went to Roger Ebert's website. I discovered that the most noted movie critic made a very shortsighted mistake in his interpretation. He basically related the sled, Rosebud, to Kane's innocence and how Kane was looking back through his life pondering the missed opportunities as he was dying. But how is it that a simple sled, which up until one major event meant nothing more than something fun, could be remembered through an entire lifetime and pondered on the deathbed? The only major event for the sled was being stricken against Thatcher, it is quite clear that the sled symbolized more than just "lost opportunities."
But what does the sled symbolize if not the innocent factor, as suggest by Ebert? We have already established that the sled cannot simply just mean innocence since it was used against in resistance to Thatcher. Therefore, it has a higher purpose. Before we can conclude any further, we must establish another blow to Ebert's innocence argument. Had Kane said Rosebud only on his deathbed, Ebert could have been more correct in his assertion. However, Ebert fails to note that Kane uttered Rosebud right after smashing of Susan Alexander's room, after she had abruptly left. What would be truly innocent about that? As Ebert symbolizes a child as innocent, I symbolize this as just that: childish.
To prop up my arguments, let us take the next two points as a "final blow" to Roger Ebert. As I said, there is nothing innocent about Kane's behavior but rather it is childish. As we can see in the Thatcher incident, there too, it seems more childish than innocent. However, the "final blows" come from "testimony" against Kane from the elder Jed Leland and Susan Alexander as she leaves Xanadu, right before the crazed Kane knocks down her room (as mentioned above). Jed Leland said that Kane always sought for love, but never found it. Why? Let's go back to the scene where Leland is drunk. There, he tells Kane that he only wanted love under his own selfish conditions. Just as a child might who simply wants things his own way. This selfish motive and the "my-way-or-the-high-way" childish temper are also supported by the scene as Susan leaves Kane. He pleads with her, and it looks as if she might stay. However, Kane starts rambling on about how she cannot leave him. This prompts her to say that Kane is self-motivated and that he always was about his own self and not about anyone else. In conclusion, it is extremely accurate to assert that Kane's last words reflect on his desire to control everything, love and death, which he cannot overcome, due to his regressed childish behavior and selfish motives.
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[Perhaps this essay isn't that bad.]
When R.P. McMurphy first appears in the ward, he seems energetic and rebellious, and we are shortly aware that he has been sent to the mental institution to determine whether he is mentally ill. He arrives from a prison work farm where he has been known as a person who is belligerent and lazy, and who cannot comply with rules. Our first impression is that he might be a non-conformist individual, but that he is not crazy whatsoever. The prison official who sent him thinks he is pretending to be crazy to get transferred out of the work farm. McMurphy's obvious intention from the very beginning is "to cooperate with ya a hundred percent."
From that moment the only question remains whether he can really live up to his own intention? Does he really have any chance to get out of that place and survive? I think that McMurphy's fate is sealed in the very moment when he entered the institution. His character determines his defeat in this "militarized" institution.
The ward where McMurphy is assigned to is supervised by Nurse Ratched, a person who is convinced that she has the knowledge of what serves the patients' best interest. She has set a series of rigid rules and regulations that she holds absolute, unchangeable, unquestionable, and unchallengeable. McMurphy's visceral desire for freedom and non-compliance to stupid and unreasonable rules opposes and antagonizes the ward's status quo. The war between McMurphy and Nurse Ratched is the center of the drama. In the consecutive scenes, they have a series of battles with increasing intensity and escalating anger. It becomes increasingly clear that their comprehension on the function of the ward, the handling of patients, and eventually life in general are totally antagonistic. McMurphy as a misfit in the ward is able to bring some life to the over-controlled atmosphere of the place. He attempts to stir up the souls of his "cuckoo" inmates are overwhelmingly successful. When being handled as "normal" human beings with true feelings and emotions, these mentally-challenged people are still able to change their attitude to life. McMurphy keeps winning his mates over and as they eventually accept him as a leader. Their admiration toward him is an acknowledgement of their own weakness and cowardice to do so. He sets several examples for them. In a memorable scene, when he tries to lift a heavy watering station to smash his way out of the ward, he fails to lift it. But he refuses to acknowledge defeat, saying that it is always better to try and fail than accept something unnecessarily, "But I tried, didn't I? God-damn it. At least I did that."
McMurphy's small victories, however, cannot be realized, they remain purely moral victories. Every time when he succeeds to prove that "a little change never hurt," he bumps into the walls of the rigid rules. These rules are rigid and are constantly being changed by Nurse Ratched to defend her challenged positions. When McMurphy suggests that it should be a variety for the inmates to watch the 1963 Worlds Series on TV, Nurse Ratched propose a vote to decide the matter. She lets the "majority rule" to prevail until it turns out that the majority of the voters are for McMurphy's proposition. To save herself from defeat she extends the number of voters to eighteen including the patients who are not able to comprehend what is going on around them. It is becoming more and more obvious that the battle is not between two equal parties. Every small moral victory of McMurphy intimidates Nurse Ratched's leadership in the ward. She thinks she cannot afford to retreat. She is convinced that every small step back, any small concession would be an inadmissible mistake that could undermine her authority. So she does not make any compromise even if she as professional should know that there have been unmistakable signs that "these little changes" in her patients' treatment could really make a difference. Nurse Ratched cannot step out from his role without jeopardizing her respect and self-reputation, but McMurphy cannot turn off his pre-determined path either. This conflict is inevitably heading for a final battle. The last chance for McMurphy to avoid his fate is when he turns back from the opened window to rush back to his fellow inmate who has just committed suicide. Because this suicide was the direct result of Nurse Ratched's humiliating and deeply inhuman behavior toward Billy, McMurphy's former humiliations, failures, and rage culminate to his attempt to strangle Nurse Ratched.
From this point, McMurphy's fate is fulfilled. He committed an open revolt against the authority and failed. It is not questionable what retaliation he can expect. Although he has tried to change and reform the world of the ward around him with peaceful and cunning manner, he failed. The institution (and its embodiment in Nurse Ratched) does not tolerate any deviation from what it (she) considers to be followed. Knowing all of that, McMurphy's attempts have been doomed to failure from the very beginning. His failure is coded in his character: he wants to live free or die if that's not possible.
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[This essay is verbal diarrhea of the obvious. And when I ran out of diarrhea, I just made up stuff completely out of thin air. None of my "analysis" would actually be supported as it is all shit.]
Huck's learned racist views of Jim are best brought out in him when he is, ironically, supposed to be superior to Jim. Furthermore, Huck's racist views in these situations present him in a foolish and even inferior level than what Jim is supposed to be. In these and other situations, we are aware of Huck's racism in his agitated and derogatory language used against Jim and his guilt in not turning in Jim. These two interwoven characteristics situated throughout the novel in various circumstances support the idea that Huck's racism does not only serve to appear when he is supposed to be far beyond the black Jim, but it also serves to be ironically self-degrading for Huck.
First, we must deal with the language Huck uses to demean Jim. It is quite apparent in the book that the word nigger is used in a negative sense. It is used when Huck finds himself in a situation where he cannot get himself out of, as in the argument he had with Jim regarding King Solomon and later the argument with the French. In the first one, Jim gets really adamant about his opinion that Solomon did not care about his children since he had so many; while Huck can only say that Jim has missed the point. Without actually saying what the "real" point is, perhaps because he cannot remember the point the widow taught him, Huck cannot argue with Jim and just calls him a nigger. In the second argument, Huck tries to tell Jim that people in France do not speak English but French. Jim refutes Huck's logic by telling him that a Frenchman should talk like a man. Although Jim is defiantly wrong in the second argument, and perhaps in the first, too, his cogent logic scores some points against Huck. Jim figures it out in his own lucid manner why Huck is wrong, while in neither of the arguments does Huck himself figure out why he is right. As a result, Huck cannot try to argue with Jim and thus out of childish frustration calls Jim a nigger each time. This presents Jim in a positive light because he, unlike Huck, can think for himself. Huck is made to seem an even bigger fool by the malapropism Mark Twain uses when Huck uses the title "dolphin" to refer to the "Lost Dauphin."
Second, Huck finds himself very guilty when he realizes that he should have turned in Jim to some authorities. This is because of the stolid view Huck holds of Jim's condition and freedom. Huck only feels guilty because in his mind Jim is only the $800 Ms. Watson lost, not as a human being. To underscore Huck's view of Jim just as property, we can look at how miserable Huck feels when he learns Jim wants to make his separated wife and children free by "robbing" their master of their "property" (the family members). Simply put, Huck has no emotional feeling for Jim; he is just someone's property that ought to be returned. It is also noteworthy to speculate that Huck might also feel uneasy about Jim's freedom because when Jim is free, Jim will technically have the same rights as Huck.
Huck's racism is presented in two ways. The first one results from his ignorance. Unlike Jim who follows his logic, even if it is false, Huck spares his thinking by simply declaring Jim a nigger. He uses the word as a synonym for stupid when it is quite ironic that it should actually be the other way around. This reveals Huck's inferiority to the uneducated Jim. Secondly, Huck's racism results from the fact that he does not consider Jim as a human being with feelings and simply dubs him as property.
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[This essay is an elaboration of a single sentence. Consider it the world's longest sentence at over 300 words. It's basically the same stuff over and over again with the extremely obvious stuff dressed up intellectually. Not bad, but not great either.]
Alfred Hitchcock manipulates the audience into watching every scene filled with terror and anxiety due to his usage of black and white for the film. Instead of using color film, which was already commonplace, Hitchcock uses this simplicity to his advantage by deceiving the most important sense: sight. The trick is simple but effective and based on an obvious contradiction: although the film is a visual art, Hitchcock deliberately gives up operating with realistic pictures full with colors. By avoiding the use of colors, the black and white film with grayscale effects seems rather creepy with its elongated shadows, a liquid resembling dark blood (FYI it was chocolate syrup!), and the eerie house next to the Bates Motel. As a result, these very ominous signs lead us to our instinctual fear of the unknown: we can see it, but we do not exactly know what it is and we cannot quite put our hands on it.
With our misled vision, a chain of events unfolds. We now have to depend on our ears to grope through the nothingness of the dark. As an "auxiliary sense," our ears just amplify what our eyes do not see. That is, our ears reinforce the obscurity of the objects and translate them into pure terror of the unknown. The first thing that terrifies the viewer is the fast-paced reoccurring background music. It tends picks up one's heart rate and makes one very tense. The lack of any major sound effects proves to be vital. What little sound effect there is, it is taken in as something quite important and thus, ads to overall fear. The sound effects reiterate and force us to associate them with events. The water dripping down the drain: Miss Crane being stabbed to death. Bubbles oozing: Miss Crane's car slowly sinking to its swampy grave. Our extra sense of hearing combined with our "damaged sight" gives Hitchcock an excellent way to control us into being afraid of something mysterious that is not quite right.
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[This is the shittiest thing I have ever let flow from my hands. I started writing this around 10PM the night before it was due at a swim meet in the locker room. I finished writing on paper just in time to catch the other team's swimmers run completely nakedly into the room. Then about twelve guys proceeded to take showers in the bathroom that had only eight showers... Seriously, this was probably the first in the line of self-degrading things in high school that ultimately led to my now demise. I got a really high grade on this while my other essays (not the ones above as those were short movie review essays) which had more than an hour's work were all given bad grades. I started to realize with this paper how much crap school is. You write complete shit, don't spend any time on it and get a great grade. This rectal excrement is horrible but thanks for ruining my work ethic.]
Warning to the Reader!
This essay is not meant to portray real events, it merely serves to ponder the question what if the Indians discovered the "Old World"? Although the author assumes that by pondering this question some obvious and some not so obvious historical errors and inaccuracies occur, he has tried to do the best of his ability to put together and present a sane portrayal.
History Completely Reversed
'Twas on a sunny day that Openchankanough the brother of Powhatan decided to hatch a plan to embark upon the adventure of his life: the quest to a "New World." Or more correctly, a quest for just the sake of a quest, because he could neither deny or affirm the existence of such a place. Growing up as a child, he had heard of great stories of stocky, red-bearded men with horned helmets and ships of enormous size. Openchankanough himself doubted these rumors, for he now knew better than to believe such childish fantasies. He wanted to be remembered like the same people he was seeking in the legends. Yet somewhere inside of him, he wanted these rumors to be true. He did not want to live his life in his same little village with the idlers, time-wasters, and other people he considered rather dull. Either way, he was going to be remembered for his adventurous spirit in legends and myths, the same ones he himself was seeking, or be the fabric of Indian history by discovering new lands in a far off distant place. This young Indian noble of high status wanted an adventure to quench his thirst for curiosity and to escape the mundane life of the village.
So on that day, in the shadows and depths of the forest, he gathered his closest friends of whom all had his desires. They wisely made him the leader, and they decided that their plans must be kept a secret. They paid a young boy to tell the villagers in the morning what had happened, for the villagers thought they simply went on a fishing trip. During the night, they went to the village's small harbor and untied the best and biggest ships and set sail in search of adventure and the New World.
In a swift wind and choppy seas, they made the journey across the ocean and sighted land a seemingly barren piece of land. Not one of them died, which in itself boosted morale for them all and proved to them that they are all strong and fit. They landed on a very rocky coast, their small boat almost capsized and threatened the survival of them all. Unfortunately for them on the day they sighted land the winds were gusty, but they had to land, for they were very low on food and rations. Openchankanough wisely suggested to them instructions on how to land, and they did so with great hardship. But once again, like in the long hard journey across the great empty sea, they proved themselves fit and unbeatable against all.
Due to the great reefs and rocky landing site, even this one being the best one for them, their boat capsized, spilling all the passengers inside. Luckily for them they capsized in just a few feet of water, and realizing this, they simply laughed. They finally made it to a land they only wished existed. However, this brought about some unexpected problems. How where they going to survive in such a lifeless, or so they thought, barren place with no crops to plant? All they had were pipes, tobacco for them, and some very few pieces of sun-dried jerky still left over from the great sea odyssey. Although their tribe was agrarian by choice and chose not to lead a nomadic life, Openchankanough and his crew did not forget their ancient roots. Soon they began to hunt for the most peculiar looking dear and other small game that looked similar and quite odd at the same time. Following the deer and rabbits, they soon encountered the legendary red-bearded men. They looked quite hairy and they wore peculiar dresses in the most unnatural way. The men whom they have just met right there seemed awfully scared of them and started to flee. They tried to make contact with the foreigners, but it was a long time, perhaps a month or so, before they could talk to the men. When Openchankanough and his few brave men did talk to them, the frightened men now seemed hospitable. Was this out of fear and just a sort of appeasement? For the British, as they were called, had nothing to fear the Indians. They had no food, no weapons, and did not have a good supply of anything. They accepted the British people's great hospitality with thanks, because they certainly needed it. Before long, the Indians, as the British called them, became established and had a few houses built near the British.
Openchankanough now was amazed. He discovered a new land with many new interesting people in it. There were many adventures in it to satisfy his thirst and curiosity. His problem now was not boredom, as had been in the Old World, but where to start! Many of the British admired these new Indians. The British admired them for their curiosity. This great friendship lasted not much, just until new people came.
Some of Openchankanough's crew went back for home not to stay there, but to recruit more people to come back. The many who came had filthy manners. They wreaked havoc for the British and soon they begin viewing the Indians with great hostility. Openchankanough could only watch in despair. Then one night, the British had quite enough, and they took Openchankanough, the supposed leader of these menacing Indians, with them. He could only plead with the British and only ask for their mercy. Then when all chaos broke loose and was just a minute away from death, he showed them an interesting little packet with a nice aroma. He put the contents inside his pipe lit a fire and gave it to his friends turned captors. They liked the tobacco very much and somehow his life was spared. However, instead of killing him there, they took him to a very large town they called London.
This town amazed Openchankanough. It was of such enormous size and beauty, probably just the place for him to have his many adventures. But now was not a time for an adventure of those sorts, this new adventure involved saving his own life. The people who had not killed him brought him before their king Henry VIII. Being not a very righteous king, he could not see that it was not up to Openchankanough to stop the ransacking and chaotic Indians. He ordered him to be hanged the next day. Fortunately for him, one of the king's daughters, about the same age as Openchankanough, saw the poor fellow in his jail cell. She seemed to have felt sorrow for him and did not want to see him dead. So the next day, as Openchankanough was led up to the gallows, she threw herself at his feet. The king, not wanting to make a big scene, stopped the execution. Openchankanough thanked Elizabeth for her great courage and for saving his life. However, Openchankanough had to leave England and the adventures he longed he wanted, for he was no longer welcome. He was saddened by this extreme sad state of things: he could not pursue his dream of searching for dreams, he had to live old and think about what he could have done differently to make them happen.