Conclusion

...The quote I chose for a Villain's Conscience was, "The healthy man does not torture others. Generally, it is the tortured who turn into torturers." - Carl Jung. I am happy I chose this quote because it was brought up again with my media source, the song about John Wayne Gacy, Jr. I looked into Gacy's past to see the reasons why he decided to commit his awful crimes. He was tortured as a child through abuse from his father, like Carl Jung said, and he did turn into the torturer. This leads me to believe that a conscience can be influenced by external factors. Perhaps so far, that it can take him over the edge so that he will never feel guilt, almost as if he didn't have a conscience. "A Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe had some elements that came up again in my tapestry. Once, during the song "John Wayne Gacy, Jr.", a verse says, "look beneath the floorboards, for the secrets I have hid." In "A Tell-Tale Heart", the murderer hides the old man's body beneath the floorboards. I have now come to realise that this might be a metaphor for guilt. You can cover it up, but it will always be there right beneath you. Also, the photographs, especially the last one, "Driven Mad", represent the actual physical effects of a guilty conscience. In "A Tell-Tale Heart", the man is driven absolutely insane by "the sound of the old man's beating heart", but in reality, it was probably just his own heart beating faster and louder as his guilt consumed him. In my second quotation by Leonardo da Vinci, he says that a person who is sure of themselves and their morals will pursue their conscience until the day they die. This reminded me later on, of Pinocchio. He was so innocent and for lack of a better word, ignorant when he was first made alive by the blue fairy. He needed a conscience to tell him what was right and wrong or else he would have made the wrong decision. This tells me that the strength of a conscience will vary from person to person, and that strength determines what they will do. But is it possible for a person to have such a weak conscience that it doesn't even exist? Are there people in the world who don't have a conscience at all? Also, the poem, "Better Than Gold" describes how if a person is inexperienced with the temptations of wealth, they have a clear conscience. In "Pinocchio", he is led astray by a sly but uneducated fox named Honest John. Honest John tempts Pinocchio by telling him that he can have fame faster without going to school. His conscience, Jiminy Cricket must tell him that Honest John is not so honest and that he really must go to school because its the right thing to do. In "Life of Pi", Pi's conscience is represented through a tiger named Richard Parker. Richard Parker never speaks but he helps Pi survive while still keeping his morals. Conscience is incredibly important to our world. Without it, society would be a wreck. We need morals to believe in or we would be running around committing acts like John Wayne Gacy, Jr. We need guilt or we would never feel bad for going against what is right. Conscience will always be there, whether we listen to it or not.