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Sympathy In The Phantom Of The Opera

Decent Essays

Some people would say that it is wrong to not feel sympathy for someone. Everyone’s life is hard in different ways, but some people just don’t deserve it. In the novel, The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux, this happens to be the case. A deformed human, who lives in the Opera House, has done many bad things and doesn’t deserve to have anyone’s pity. The real definition of sympathy is: “feelings of pity and sorrow for someone else’s misfortune” (123). This does not apply to the Phantom because ultimately we should not sympathize with his character. He had a bad past and he does not care about others which leads him to kill and torture people for no apparent reason; why should we feel pity for someone who does such things? The Phantom has not only done bad things while he has lived in the Opera; everything started in the past when he was young. Children learn from their parents and as they get older they tend to do a lot of the same things, in the same way, that their parents do. “... My mother, daroga, my poor, unhappy mother would never ... let me kiss her ... she used to run away ... and throw me my mask!” (167). His mother never felt sorry for him. This might have been what led him into doing bad things as he got older; all because he wasn’t loved. This does not mean that we should sympathize with him though, because everything that he did was his own choice. No one made him do what he did. Back when he was in Mazenderan working for the Little Sultana, he murdered

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