Have a look at this woman below. What do you make of her? She could be the lady who lives next door, couldn't she? The neighbourly neighbour we would all like to have.
She lived in the US for 20 years and, sure enough, neighbours and friends described her as a very nice lady with a big heart. Well, these friends and neighbours must have been surprised when they found out that this nice lady with a big heart was found guilty of crimes during the Balkan war of the 1990s. According to the judge, she was responsible for particular cruelty to detainees of Bosnian-Croat forces.
This cruelty apparently included the torture of ethnic Serbs. Witnesses said she carved crosses into prisoners' foreheads, forced one man to drink petrol before setting fire to his hands and face, and forced others to crawl naked across broken glass. The most serious of her offences was, apparently, the killing of a prisoner who she stabbed in the neck. Sounds awful, doesn't it? And yet, what about the nice lady in the pic? How can we reconcile her nice big heart with the atrocities she apparently carried out?
Maybe the very nice lady in the pic found justification for her actions in the exceptional circumstances of that time. Perhaps she rationalised. Kill some, save thousands. Maybe she thought her acts were necessary for the greater good!
Of course, these speculations are grist to the mill for writers. The "ordinary" person forced to act in extraordinary circumstances. Mr Average obliged to react in an exceptional situation. Such "ordinary" and "average" fictional characters might well force the reader to ask her/himself, "What would I do?" Tolstoy dealt with this theme brilliantly in "Master and Man. What "theme" am I referring to? Well, I did not refer to one. The reader is left to make his/her own conclusions about the theme and meaning of this story. That is why "Master and Man" is such great fiction.
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