Condoned Violence vs. Murder Theme Analysis

Both Zaroff and Rainsford are former military men and avid hunters—in other words, they participate in socially-condoned killing. But Zaroff also participates in a kind of killing that is not socially accepted—hunting human beings for sport—the central plot point of “The Most Dangerous Game.” Zaroff insists that his actions are justified, and that he has been liberated from the silly “Victorian” sentiments about human life to which Rainsford remains captive. Rainsford, however (and, presumably, the reader), draws a hard line against killing other human beings for sport. While the reader might at first identify morally with Rainsford, by the end of the story, Rainsford has taken two more human lives. The moral complexity of these killings demonstrates that the line between socially acceptable violence (hunting, warfare, self-defense) and murder is blurry.

Both Rainsford and Zaroff approve of killing in some circumstances: they are avid, skilled hunters, and they both served in the military, which required them to kill other people. In these contexts, Connell demonstrates that killing is not just socially accepted, but also honorable or even fashionable. For example, when explaining his upbringing, Zaroff mentions his time as an officer in the Russian military, something “expected of noblemen’s sons.” Therefore, wartime violence was a social expectation and an indication of Zaroff’s noble class status, or his “civilized” background. Furthermore, Zaroff displays his hunting trophies (animal heads) in his dining hall and throughout his house, which shows that these relics of killing are socially fashionable, making Zaroff appear, paradoxically, more civilized to others.

While both of these aspects of Zaroff seem relatively normal to Rainsford, Zaroff and Rainsford do not draw the same boundary between acceptable and unacceptable killing. “Thank you, I'm a hunter, not a murderer," Rainsford says in response to Zaroff’s invitation to join the manhunt, indicating Rainsford’s strong feelings about the distinction between violence against people and animals. However, Connell suggests several times that this boundary is more porous than “civilized” people might like to think. Refuting Rainsford’s moral prohibition against killing humans in peacetime, Zaroff suggests that the line between wartime and peacetime killing isn’t actually significant; surely Rainsford’s experiences in the war must have cured him of “romantic ideas about the value of human life,” Zaroff says, hinting that his own experience of war is what blurred this boundary in him. Moreover, after Zaroff explains the hunt, he invites his guest to see his “new collection of heads” in the library. Readers are left to wonder whether these are human or animal heads, and with this ambiguity Connell has taken a fashionable habit and shown that it was always grotesque and brutal.

While Zaroff is unquestionably a serial murderer, Connell is less clear about Rainsford. By the end of the story, Rainsford has taken two human lives: Ivan’s and Zaroff’s (in addition to whoever he might have killed in the war). Rainsford killed Ivan in self-defense, and one could argue that he killed Zaroff in self-defense, too—even though Rainsford had “won the game” (hypothetically ensuring his own safety), it’s reasonable to conclude that Zaroff would have to die for Rainsford to be truly safe on the island. However, in the moment of his death, Zaroff was not threatening Rainsford, they were not at war, and they were not hunting animals—so the story’s final killing seems to suggest, in itself, that the hard line Rainsford tried to draw between acceptable and unacceptable killing was never as clear as he thought.