In all Fantasy and Science Fiction there has always seemed to be the conflicts and battles between good and evil and how the good overcomes the mental and physical challenges. The typical Fantasy would support all these characteristics and any Fantasy book read would prove this and there are very few that would not. This essay will discuss stories that prove this case. The Cloven Viscount is a story about the aspects of man-kind and how there is good and evil in everyone of us. In Lord of the Rings however, there are many more battles, both mental and physical and is about how Frodo Baggins has to deal with these problems. A different kind of Fantasy story is The Lord of the Flies. A tale about a group of young boys stranded on an island and have to face the elements and survive the over taken minds of each other.
The Cloven Viscount is a story about the aspects of man-kind. The splitting half of the Viscount into good and evil represents what is in each person. Both sides of the Viscount face conflict in their journey to win Pamela's hand in marriage. The evil side of Viscount Merdardo believed that only evil in the people should prevail whereas the good side tried to make everyone's lives perfect but in doing all this, he made lives worse. .
" For the pears were not whole, but in halves, cut longways, and each still hanging on its own stalk; all there was of every pear was the right side (or the left according to which way one looked, but they were all on the same side) and then other half had vanished, cut or maybe eaten." " The Viscount has passed by here!" said the servitors. (Calvino, Italo 1998 Our Ancestors Random House, Sydney).
This quote talks about the evil side of the Viscount and how he went around in the town and forest cutting things in half, and the half he left "standing" was the same side as was left of him. At the end of the story, both the good and evil sides of the Viscount fight each other for the love of Pamela but they end up being stitched back together and by doing this, Italo Calvino shows that there is no such thing as a purely good or evil person in this world, everyone has both good and evil in them whether or not they know it exists.
