Mara Scribner
The Man in The Well
6/25/10

When I first began reading The Man in the Well I figured it would be about race in some way considering that is the theme of all of our past pieces. After reading this I stood corrected. The story is about a group of children that happen to come across a man stuck deep in the ground inside of a well. I understood that the children didn’t want the man to know their names, because he was a stranger. The children wanted to know about the man. They wondered what he looked like and what his name was. This was simply because children are easily entertained and the man mystified the children. However, the children never got help for the man, and I am assuming the man drowned in the well after the rain storm.
The story was easy for me to read and the plot was clear. However, I feel that there was some underlying motive or purpose to this story that I missed. I feel that the purpose of the story could be to show that humans are naturally cruel by nature. Some people believe that humans learn cruelty over the years, but others believe that humans are born with a sense of evil in their hearts, which the children of this story illustrate. I don’t understand why the children never got help. I wondered this the whole story and it really angered me that the children continued to come back to talk to the man, yet they never really attempted to save him. They brought him water and threw it down to him one day, but clearly that wouldn’t save his life. The children had to have known that the man would die if they never retrieved their parents and got some help from the authorities. I have a strong sympathy for the man. I’m sure that he dies at the end. His life could have been easily spared if the children didn’t view him as a type of sick game, but saw him as a human being. If the point of the story is to show natural cruelty, then the author did a very good job of it. The story kept me interested just because I wanted to know what happened to the man in the end. After the rain storm, I’m sure the children realized they had made a big mistake and I’m also sure they would be haunted by the memory of that man for the rest of their lives.