For Every Monster There is a Hero

I have many fears in my life. Heights, death, and failure are some of the biggest ones. These may not sound all that bad, considering everyone fails sometimes, heights are amazing to some people, and death is experienced by everyone. So I don’t really feel like my fears are all that bad. There is one huge fear to some people that I am glad to say I haven’t had to fear yet in my life, and most likely will never have to. That fear is rape. Being a male growing up in a small town where almost everyone knows everyone, I feel that I have never had to be afraid of rape. Mainly because of being a male I feel that it is very uncommon for one to get raped. Then you add in the fact that you almost know everyone in that town, it makes it a lot more safe. This is a completely different story for the character Jasmine in the novel Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee.

Jasmine is trying to start a new life by coming to America. As she would call it she was on a “mission.” In order to get to America, Jasmine boarded a ship of illegal immigrants. The problem with this ship was the crazy and evil captain. When talking about the captain Jasmine says, “For the first time in my life I understood what evil was about. It was about not being human. Half-Face was from an underworld of evil. (116)” She considers him to be evil to the point where she says he basically can’t be from this world. Although he did get them to America, he decided to rape Jasmine. In a moment of hard decisions Jasmine decides to grab a knife out of her pants. She is thinking about killing herself, but then she says, “It was the murkiness of the mirror and a sudden sense of mission that stopped me. What if my mission was not yet over? (117)” In this moment she realizes that since she is not sure if her mission is over that instead of killing herself that she will killer her rapist.

With a quick slice of the knife, Jasmine did cut the throat of her rapist. Like she said earlier in the novel, “For every monster there is a hero. For every hero, a monster. (114)” Going by what she said the captain was the monster, and by killing him she has become the hero. But if she hadn’t realized that she wasn’t done with her mission there would be no hero. The rapist still would have been the monster, but if she were to have killed herself that wouldn’t make her the hero. So, in my mind she made the right decision in killing the monster rather than herself. The point of her coming to America is to start a new life, not to end her life. So with this Jasmine is still going on in her mission, and hopefully doesn’t have anyone like this holding her back from it.