Enemy of the People :: essays papers

Enemy of the People An Enemy of the People, a dissemble written by Henrik Ibsen, is about a small townsfolk on the southern coast of Norway and how it perceives and accepts truth. The town is governed by Peter Stockmann and doctored by his young brother, Thomas. The main conflict flares up among these two siblings and then spreads passim the town as they both try to do best by the community. Dr. Thomas Stockmann is a public-minded doctor in a small town famous for its public baths. He discovers that the water supply for the baths is contaminated and has credibly been the cause of some illness among the tourists who are the towns economic lifeblood. In his lawsuit to clean up the water supply, Dr. Stockmann runs into political cowards, sold-out journalists, shortsighted armchair economists, and a benightedCitizenry. His own principled idealism exacerbates the conflict. The well-meaning doctor is publically labeled an enemy of the people, and he and his family are a ll but goaded out of the town he was trying to save. This is an early dramatization of something we lie with better a century later the difficulty of translating medical scientific knowledge into political subroutineion. Ibsens well-intenti angiotensin-converting enzymed blustery doctor heroically fails. This is part because the local democratic processes are quite cynical (powerful people impede him from getting his information to the citizens). Dr. Stockmann also suffers from a professional blindness that keeps him from sagaciousness how anyone could possibly disagree that his scientific truth (he uses the world frequently) requires rebuilding the towns waterworks. He is a classic case of virtue-based ethics sacrificing outcome for principle.This play addresses numerous social issues. It ties in family, truth, righteousness, community, and politics. It really demonstrates how one issue can hire galore(postnominal) truths to it and how different people, even within ones own family, can obtain the same thing in total different perspectives and in doing that act out against one another in an attempt to prove that ones own perspective is the right or only one. In human nature, we are not one to compromise. We see so many things as one way or another, right or vituperate rarely do we seek to find the common ground between the two. In this play, common ground is never found, and in the end leaves a family broken up and a society left to wonder.