Prus’s Mold: Is Human Achievement All That We Make it Out to Be? Hayley Jasinski 10th Grade

“‘Is this supposed to be the history of mankind?’” is a question that is asked towards the end of “Mold of the Earth,” a short story by Bolesaw Prus. It is a story that questions what humans have truly accomplished, and how we perceive the past our ancestors lived in. In “Mold of the Earth,” Prus is conveying a message that says humans are just another living organism that crawls across the face of the earth, and that we haven’t come as far as we make it out to be. The ways he portrays this message is through the main character’s description of the globe he compares to humanity and the parallels between the botanist’s comments at the beginning and at his reactions at end of the story.

First, the author portrays his message through the main character looking at the globe of mold. When the main character observes this globe, he notices that each spot of mold looks very similar to landmasses that can be found on our world map. “There was the Asian landmass with the little peninsula of Europe; there was Africa, the two Americas...” (Prus 2). This is significant because it shows that everything on the earth can be reduced down to one of the simplest life forms that exists on the planet, mold. All human accomplishments, failures,...