Literary Analysis Essay on The Cat in the Hat

Introduction

Ethics is a broad terminology that has been in use for many years and has been used in many professions. Ethics is the key driver or a platform that lays out the moral principles that people ought to follow, and it affects many things that run from the way they make decisions to how they conduct themselves while leading their lives. On that, ethics covers different dilemmas which revolve around people living responsibly, by being in a position to differentiate between the good and bad. Ethics further has been divided into different norms that it is being used whereby each of these norms provides a different set of principles that apply to that set of norms. Ethics can also be derived from various forms of writing which include novels, articles, habits and the character of people. In that three types of ethical theories cover three areas in which ethics is used, these include meta-ethics, normative ethics, and applied ethics. Meta-ethics is concerned with the nature of moral judgment, and normative ethics is mostly concerned with what is right or wrong while applied ethics covers complex topics like war. From the above, ethics can be concluded to mean custom, habit, and personality.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

The following essay is going to analyze the ethical lessons brought out by the Cat in the Hat and how it is brought out.

The cat in the hat is a story that involves a stranger, portrayed as the cat comes into the house of two young children, whose mother is not around. The turns of events that take place are what the following analysis and teachings are going to be based on.

At the beginning of the story, the author introduces two kids that have been left by their mother in the house to cater for it. In these, the kids are expected to be responsible and be tidy which the teaching that children are taught when young is. The aspect of the kids being left alone by their mother presents them with a perfect opportunity of experiencing their freedom and how they can overcome temptations offered to them. On this occasion, the situation provides the children with sexual yearnings that it cannot be hidden that they have for each other. Their desire to satisfy their primitive needs is portrayed in this part of the paper. The children display that they are ethical enough in that they do not engage themselves in sexual activities which would be considered to be unethical basing it on the normative ethics. It is immoral to have any form of sexual intimacy with a person whom you are related, as for this case the kids seem to understand the rights and wrongs in which they are not supposed to engage themselves in thus they can be considered to ethical. These turn of events continues when the author introduces the cat in the hat to join the children. The cat presents to the children some temptations which will push them into doing things that they are not supposed to do and pushes them to the limit of giving up.

The cat introduced in the story comes with a set of tricks that are used to make the children fall into making wrong decisions. In the story, there is the presentation of fish which as seen from the story represents Christ. Ethics and religion go hand in hand are not separable thus the representation of the fish to portray Christian morality for throughout the story the fish takes the role of warning the children about the tricks brought out by the cat and seems to inform them of the traps. This representation of the fish tends to showcase the warnings that humanity receives from the dangers that are related to the unleashing of their primitive urges. In response to the attempts made by the fish to warn the children, the cat takes the aquatic naysayer and says down with morality and down with God. In this, the cat removes the possibility of the cat to be in a position of warning the children of the tricks played by the cat. In the actual world, these are experienced when people shut down people that try to guide the morality of the people.

The introduction of icons that portray the western culture and the two books that characterize the new and the Old Testament and the iconic representation of the lactic fluid that would represent the maternal loss experienced by the children when their mother left for the afternoon. These icons would make the children more vulnerable to doing unethical behaviors as portrayed below. The Pandora's Box is used by the author to be the origin of thing one which represents ego and thing two that represents superego. With the children not being able to control these two things, the ego, and superego, they make a mess more than that the children had made earlier. On this case, the Christ figure that is the fish warns the children about the incoming of their mother and this news makes the children take charge of the situation and put things back in order.

On this matter the story represents that even when people find themselves in unethical situations all that is required is for them to have a touch of psychoanalytic couch, and things will fall back to where they were supposed to be or in their original state which from the story is the situation the mother had left his children in the morning.

Conclusion

In conclusion, as it can be portrayed from the story, several occasions may make a person not be ethical or cause the distraction of the ethicality of a person. However, with the correct trigger mechanism, people can be reset to doing the correct thing which is illustrated from the story when the two kids realize their mistake and tidy up the house.

Works Cited

Horn, Austin R., et al. "An ethical analysis of the SUPPORT trial: addressing challenges posed by a pragmatic comparative effectiveness randomized controlled trial." Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 28.1 (2018): 85-118.

Hausman, Daniel, Michael McPherson, and Debra Satz. Ethics analysis, moral philosophy, and public policy. Cambridge University Press, 2016.