Instant Access To 100,000+ Essays!

Throughout history our society, the “able-bodied society” looked down at crippled people as being only part human or “the other” because of their imperfections that most of us can’t cope with, such as them being not able to walk. In “Pity and Fear” Leslie Fiedler tries to argue about many ideas as to why we act this way around the disabled. Some of Fiedler’s ideas were too hard to agree with such as “ deep in the undermind of all of us there persists a desire to murder the disabled, even when they are infants,” because I don’t have a desire to kill the disabled and I’m pretty sure many people don’t either. But the idea that did grab my attention was when Leslie Fiedler said “literature lets us accept our failure to realize our ideals without betraying us into bland self-deceit or blind self-esteem”. This says that literature harbors every able-bodied persons hidden desires and fears of becoming disabled, and making us aware of our temporary state. Even though in the Cripple of the Inishman by Martin Mcdonagh and “ The Incomplete Quad” by David Sedaris, the authors write about different ideas about the disabled and how they are treated, they both seem to be aware of the ideas that Fiedler writes