Ooooh No, Oroonoko

Well, I am frightened by the ending. And I am trying to not think that Aphra Behn is sadistically crazy, so with that in mind, the only thing I can say about this book is this: If she is trying to portray the native peoples of Africa in a positive light and prove a point, she definitely did. She has shown a great prince, who was well educated and just like a white man, be literally and symbolically ripped apart and destroyed by white slave owners. This novella strongly shows how a man who similar to the white race and be beaten down and forced to be a savage. It's like the saying, "If you call a dog a bad name, he'll answer to it." I think I've actually used that quote in a blog before, but I think it applies again. Oroonoko increasingly because "whiter" and "whiter" as the story progresses, as he picks up things like the name Caesar, and he becomes more aggressive like the white men. He was not even planning to revolt, and yet by the end he is just as violent as the next. I did think that Behn tried to foreshadow her point when she showed Oroonoko hunting in the woods. He shoots through the heart of a female lion and gives the cub to the narrator. I think that the female lion is somehow representing the murder of his lover, who he kills himself, and she is therefore unable to give birth. But in giving the lion cub to Behn, he is somehow passing on the legacy to her. Maybe that's a stretch, but I'm really trying to think of Behn as a good person who is trying to prove a point. Basically, by allowing the reader to relate to Oroonoko in the first part of the book, she makes them more sympathetic to his gruesome and horrible death at the end. If the reader can be sympathetic to his mistreatment and death, perhaps they will be more sympathetic to slaves and the issues at hand during the time period. Or, Behn is just really sick. I'm not sure but I hope its the first.