The Consequences Of An Abusive Environment Essay Sample

People often look at villains who have done terrible things and think that they would never do something like that. For example let us say that a mother murders her children. Most people would say “How could someone do that?”, but we do not ever think about what caused it or what in their life led up to that moment. In Vicious written by V.E Schwab, Eli Ever and Victor Vale, 2 college roommates became friends. There senior year Eli started researching what causes a person to have extraordinary abilities. Eli discovered that someone could develop an extraordinary ability by having a near death experience. They both go on a journey to try to turn into extraordinary people. Fueled by ambition and the need for power Eli turns evil and Victor goes to jail. Victor is trying to find Eli after he finds out that Eli is murdering extraordinary people without reason. Eli believes that extraordinary people are unnatural and are an abomination. People are made evil because of the abusive environment and emotional trauma that they have had in the past.

Eli became evil because he was physically abused by his dad as a child and now sees the world and thinks that everyone is bad. Adam Janos, a New York city based writer and reporter says, “a serial killers’ psychological dysfunction often correlates strongly to a broken childhood home.”(Janos). Eli has scars on his back and when Victor asks about them he says that his dad did that to him. He then continues to talk about how his dad played for what he did. Eli does not specifically say how his dad played for what he did, but the reader can assume that maybe Eli did something to his dad to make him pay for hurting him that way. If Eli killed his dad which we can assume because he refers to his dad in the past tense like he is dead. This could have affected him and causing him to see evil in everyone without really noticing, and when he became an EO this characteristic increased. The psychology of evil by Phil Zimbardo talked about the Stanford prison experiment and how people react in tough situations, he said, “If you want to change the person you need to change the situation”(Zimbardo). The traumatic situation that Eli was put in as a child increased his chances of becoming bad and making evil decisions. If Eli had another best friend who was not Victor and Eli told his friend about his hypothesis. That friend would have most likely reacted differently and told him no or that he was crazy.  Eli would have then agreed with his friend and stopped the experiment and nothing bad would have happened. 

Because Eli Ever had a near death experience he came back missing a piece of himself which caused him to think differently on how things work. After Victor gets detained because Eli turned him in when he killed Angie. Victor escapes and goes to see Eli. They start fighting and Victor says, “Death takes something with it”(Schwab 134). Eli and Victor both feel different after they died and came back. Eli says that what changed about him was that he lost his fear. So now everything that he thought and all his emotions were extremely magnified so he felt everything on a higher level. Eli always believed in god and when he came back he believed that god brought him back better than he was. He believed that all the other people who had a near death experience were not natural except him. Eli thought he was the only one who came back better and that god made better and let him come back so he could fulfill his purpose. To kill all the unnatural people. Phil Zimbado talks about how the people do not impact the situation, the situation impacts the people,he says, “The system creates the situation that corrupts the individual”(Zimbardo). For example Eli did not choose to come back from the dead missing a piece of his soul. He did not know that he would come back differently. If we would have then things would be different. He was put in a situation where it was physically and mentally hard for him to control his actions. Especially since Serena was compelling him to listen to her. The situation he was put in caused him to think differently and also act in a way that he would not normally act. 

People are made evil because of their life experiences and how they react to events that are traumatic. Eli was physically abused as a child which caused him to view the world in a different way than a person that had a perfect and happy childhood. When Eli decided to do anything possible to prove his hypothesis of what it takes to become an extraordinary person he gave up a piece of himself. Driven by ambition he did not realize what he was turning into. People crave power and will do pretty much anything it takes to gain more and more power until everything falls apart and they realize what they have become.