Enemy of the People :: essays papers

Enemy of the People An Enemy of the People, a function written by Henrik Ibsen, is about a weeny town on the southern coast of Norway and how it perceives and accepts truth. The town is governed by Peter Stockmann and makeed by his younger brother, Thomas. The main conflict flares up between these two siblings and because spreads throughout the town as they both try to do dress hat 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 pollute and has probably been the cause of some illness among the tourists who are the towns economic lifeblood. In his effort to clean up the water supply, Dr. Stockmann runs into political cowards, sold-out journalists, s put upt(p) armchair economists, and a benightedCitizenry. His own principled idealism exacerbates the conflict. The well-meaning doctor is publicly labeled an enemy of the citizenry, and he and his family are all solely driven out of the town he was trying to save. This is an early dramatization of something we know better a century later the difficulty of translating medical scientific knowledge into political action. Ibsens well-intentioned blustery doctor heroically fails. This is partly because the local democratic processes are quite cynical (powerful people prevent him from getting his information to the citizens). Dr. Stockmann also suffers from a professional cecity that keeps him from understanding how anyone could possibly disagree that his scientific truth (he uses the world frequently) requires reconstruct the towns waterworks. He is a classic case of virtue-based ethics sacrificing outcome for principle.This play addresses many social issues. It ties in family, truth, righteousness, community, and politics. It really demonstrates how one issue thunder mug have many truths to it and how different people, even within ones own family, can see the same thing in total different perspectives and in doing that act out against one another in an attempt to fire that ones own perspective is the right or moreover one. In human nature, we are not one to compromise. We see so many things as one way or another, right or wrong rarely do we seek to find the common free-base between the two. In this play, common ground is never found, and in the finale leaves a family broken up and a society left to wonder.