the crucible

A detailed Summary of the crucible


In literal terms, a crucible is a little metal bowl used to heat metals to break them down into their original elements. In Arthur Miller's play The Crucible, the title plays a very important role in symbolizing what the characters themselves go through. They were put to the test and broken down to see what their original feelings and thoughts were. Miller easily shows the crucible experience in 3 main characters. He shows this by showing each characters' original motivation, how their motivations ended up changing, and also by showing what type of people they turned out to be in the end after the crucible experience was all said and done.

The three characters that I am going to examine are Abigail, Hale, and John Proctor. But as it is the case with most characters in this book, each of the three main characters had a goal they wanted to accomplish or a set motivation in the beginning. Abigail was the teen-aged niece of Parris, who first suspected witchcraft upon the girls. Once Abigail had been suspected, she would do anything to seem innocent and get the blame off her. She would tell lies, and most of all, blame others for the witchcraft. "I saw Goody Hawkins with the Devil!" "I saw Goody Booth with the


in the church. John saw Parris as a greedy man and didn't like the things he was doing with the church, so he rarely attended and wanted Parris out of the church. "Parris-'There is a party in this church. I am not blind;' Proctor-'Against you?...Why, then I must find it and join it.'" Once talks of witchery begin to get more serious, Mr. Hale comes along. He is a young, well-educated man who is looked upon as the expert in this situation. Hale came to this town wanting to find all the witches and put an end to the madness. And if he could do that then he could restore peace to the town, which was also important to him. Once these characters were put through the crucible experience, their motivations changed in one way or another.

To a certain degree, it seems like these characters don't even seem like the same people at the end of this book. Abigail, who at one point was the first one to point a finger at someone else, then who would do anything to avoid the conflict, finally realized she had done wrong and ran away from home. Once Hale realized what was going on in this town and how crazy things had gotten, he began to feel ashamed and corrupted and tried hard to set everything right that he could and save the innocent. The person with the most positive cha

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Approximate Word count = 861
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)

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