Essay - The large Ant

Fear can be a very powerful and unpleasant emotion aroused by impending danger, evil, pain, etc., whether the threat is real or imagined. When you have a fear you will get the feeling or condition of being afraid of someone or something. When we experience fear, several psychological and physiological responses take place all at the same time. Another fear is the fear of the unknown which is a part of our unconscious self. The unconscious is a difficult thing to control and that reflects in the human beings reactions and behaviors. “The Large Ant”, written by Howard Fast in 1960, is a short story about how our instincts are controlled by this “unknown fear”. The unknown fear is being expressed in the start of the story: “(…) when I looked up and saw it on the foot of my bed. The edge of my hand was touching the golf club, and with a single motion I swept the club (…) and killed it. (p. 783 l. ” Mr. Morgan does not know what to do when he sees the large ant crawling at the foot of his bed, but reacts like most people would do - by killing it immediately. Even though Mr. Morgan is an ordinary, intelligent and not violent man, he still reacts that way because he is a human. He is manipulated by he’s instincts which tells him what is the most obvious thing to do but what is maybe not the correct thing to do. The ant could have been harmless, but most people would not take that chance. Mr. Morgan felt badly for killing the ant once he realized that it had meant him no harm, but perhaps it was too late by then. The setting takes place in a co-existing world where the realistic world is overlapped by the fantasy world. The only thing in the story, which can be connected to the fantasy world, is the ant. The ant is a super natural element which is proved by the small weapons it carries inside itself: “Using two