The Wasp Factory Themes

The Wasp Factory Themes

Suffering should not lead one to become a villain.

Frank is an angry fellow. He has good reason to be angry, but his emotions drive him to do heinous things, making it hard for the reader to sympathize with his suffering. His privates where eaten by a dog, after all, and that would make any reasonable person angry about their fate. The nightmare that such an injury has meant for his life would be horrific. But, Frank took a wrong path somewhere in his suffering—it seems that anyone who suffers this extremely is at the crossroads of their own judgment. Why has Frank become a sociopathic villain? Because he was consumed by bitterness and regret.

Tragedy and fate.

The issue of tragedy is clearly tangled up in whatever Frank is dealing with in his head. He knows that something was taken away from him. When he was a child, he hoped for a family of his own, and when he was a young man, no doubt he longed for companionship, but fate took his chance away when a dog bit off his genitals. This tragic fate puts Frank is a special category of people—people who were made to suffer without having done anything wrong. Because he understands he was innocent when his life was stolen from him by fate, he obsesses about it, never quite accepting his fate fully.

Fortune.

Frank understands that in addition to his fate, he also has to suffer the knowledge that in the ways he suffers as an impotent man are ways that most people never suffer. He understands the uniqueness of his problems and that makes him obsessive about fortune. Fortune is the idea that some people are lucky or unlucky, and the idea of God is never far away, since the issue of fortune begs a question: Did God do this to Frank on purpose? His relationship with chance and luck makes him literally insane, and in his insanity, he subjects wasps to unique fates, like his unique fate. But if Frank is torturing the wasps, who is torturing Frank?

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