It is funny how the word ‘Evil’ turns to ‘live’ when the letters are reversed. Tomorrow When the War Began by John Marsden is about a teenage girl in Australia who finds herself and her friends stuck in the middle of a war waging in their homes. “Barney,” by Will Stanton, is a series of journal entries by a scientist that had created a mouse with human intelligence. The entries drop hints of the mouse trying to kill the scientist, until you reach the last entry, where the mouse is the writer and the scientist is dead.
In both works of fiction, Evil only existed when humans prompted its existence. In Tomorrow When the War Began, the protagonist Ellie thinks that Evil may be created by humans, and not exist in nature, as shown by an observation of a dragonfly and a mosquito. Akin to this, “Barney,” is in itself, a metaphor. The Evil of the rat would not exist if not for a human scientist creating it.
Therefore, Evil is nothing but a creation of humankind.
Evil, as stated earlier, is something that cannot exist in nature; it’s created by an intelligent society. However, society often contradicts itself in its acknowledgement of Evil. In the book, “The bible just said, “thou shalt not kill,’ then told hundreds of stories of people killing each other and becoming heroes,”(211) Ellie had thought. Then, what is the meaning of Evil, if it changes depending on perspective? Conversely, what is Good, if the same actions that are considered Evil, can be recognized as Good? Ellie comes to a conclusion, “People, shadows, good, bad, Heaven, Hell: all of these are names, labels, and that was all.
“(211) What she means to say is that the aforementioned subjects do not truly exist. They’re only concepts created by us and therefore don’t exist without us to recognize them. Evil isn’t real unless there’s a human to recognize it as real. Evil is a creation of society.
The dragonfly and the mosquito in the novel Tomorrow When The War Began represent the saying ‘eat or be eaten,’ in the most literal sense. “The dragonfly knew nothing of cruelty. He didn’t have the imagination to put himself in the mosquito’s place. He just enjoyed his meal”(236). The dragonfly didn’t have the mental capacity to be what people define as either Evil or Good, and neither does anything else, sans humans. All there is in nature is survival, and in most cases to live, one must do what many define as evil, as shown by the dragonfly’s ‘murder of the mosquito. Evil is not a concept that exists in nature, because nature only does what it needs to survive.
Barney, the antagonist in the short story, “Barney,” is an intelligent rat. He has the mental capacity to commit evil actions and know that it is Evil. In the last journal entry, Barney, pretending to be the scientist, writes, “Poor Barney is dead an soon I shell be the same. He was a wonderful ratt and life without him is knot worth livving [sic].” For the sake of being succinct, this will can be interpreted as Barney’s cover-up story and not the scientist genuinely having a sprained wrist. Firstly, due to this, it can be argued that Barney, an animal, is evil. However, Barney is only evil because the scientist enabled it by giving him intelligence. It’s the scientist that created the evil within him. Evil is a consequence of intelligence, which is something that humans have and gave Barney. Barney’s evil was the fault of the human that had created it. In short, Evil can only exist where humans are there to create it, whether that is by the perception of it, as shown by Tomorrow When the War Began by John Marsden, or literal creation, as shown by “Barney,” by Will Stanton. Since humans create it, Ellie decided it doesn’t exist in nature untouched by humans. This is shown in the revelation she had about the dragonfly and mosquito and, separately, in the short story “Barney”. To live is to be evil, and to be evil is to live.
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