Leiningen Characterization

Essay by PaperNerd ContributorHigh School, 10th grade November 2001

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Sean Marquardt Honors English 10 Hr.8 9/7/01 Leiningen Characterization Leiningen is extremely confident in himself, his abilities and most of all his intellect. When warned by the Brazilian officer, Leiningen was completely confident he could take on the many ants. His confidence leads to his arrogance. "Act of God, my eye" and The human brain needs only to become fully aware of its powers to conquer even the elements are examples of how his arrogance is utilized in his speech and his thought. Because of his passionate arrogance he would never come to the point in which he would admit his defeat, even when it seemed the ants were going to succeed. Leiningen is rather intelligent and he entirely believes in himself. He was very clever to have premeditated the idea of the two moats, which probably saved his life. Another attribute of Leiningen is that he is a very calm person.

The night the ants were present he was actually able to sleep and in fact he found himself "thoroughly refreshed" the next morning. And to end I just want to point out the strange similarity between the people of today and Leiningen. This story was written over fifty years ago but it portrays us with all of our arrogance and our complete confidence in ourselves in a very accurate manner. Let's just hope that if we come into a circumstance as dire as this we too can find a way out.