What does the island in The Most Dangerous Game represent?

The Jungle

Teeming, wild, and ungovernable, the jungle serves as a powerful symbol of Zaroff’s tangled psyche and the chaos within the island. The “snarled and ragged” growth shrouds the island, concealing Zaroff’s grotesque hunt from the rest of the world. The jungle is also an emblem of restriction and Rainsford’s loss of control because it impedes his effort to return to civilization. The morning he awakens on the island’s shore, for example, he can see no way through the tangled of trees and undergrowth before him. During the hunt, claustrophobia overtakes him as Zaroff closes in for the kill. Ultimately, Rainsford must free himself from this thorny physical and mental space and does so by rejecting the jungle altogether in favor of the sea.

The Island

Ship-Trap Island symbolizes a similarly uncharted region where the laws governing normal human discourse don’t exist. Here, General Zaroff’s plays out his homicidal whims unchecked, unimpeded, and a world apart from Rainsford’s comfortable life of privilege and ease. In many ways, the island is an antiutopian society under the rule of a tyrant seeking to exterminate other people instead of sustaining them. The autocratic Zaroff, without any compassion or regard for human life, exerts absolute control over everything. Isolated, the island is a realm of wild, uncontrollable, and unspeakable desires recklessly pursued without any sense of morality. Subject to legend and superstition, the island is an unconscious embodiment of fear, abstract and impalpable, just like the chill and shudder that Whitney feels as the yacht first sails by.

Ship-Trap Island hosts both a twisted jungle and a palatial mansion, untamed wilderness set against an edifice of noble civilization, but Connell uses the story’s events on the island to reveal those boundaries as arbitrary. After reaching the island’s shores, Rainsford experiences a false sense of security knowing from the gunshot sounds, bullet cartridge, and hunting boot print that the island is inhabited by men. He views the traces of mankind’s technology as a sign of salvation, and avoids trekking through the jungle, thinking he will be safe once he reaches the mansion. What he finds is just the opposite—the mansion is the most dangerous place on the island, and Rainsford soon learns that he must conquer all spaces of the island, both the jungle and the mansion, in order to survive. Indeed, he finally defeats Zaroff only by breaking in to the mansion and hiding in his bedroom. Thus the island as a whole acts as a kind of microcosm for the world, in which both wild places and supposedly “civilized” places can be sites of danger and human cruelty.

The island also serves as a metaphor for General Zaroff himself. A mixture of cruel violence cloaked within the external trappings of civilization, Zaroff intentionally lives in seclusion away from society and its ethical expectations. Like most psychopaths, he lacks empathy, and without that human connection, he exists as an island encircled by but distinctly apart from humanity. He literally isolates himself from others on the island, but even when he does interact with other humans he is disconnected from them because of his cruelty.

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Island and Jungle

As a symbol, the jungle is not terribly complex. But who says a symbol has to hit you over the head? (That’s not the author’s “game”).

It just wouldn’t be the same if the story took place in a suburban gated community with a bunch of cul-de-sacs. Having it take place on an island suggests isolation—a place where one man can rule without question and create his own laws. And that’s what General Zaroff wants. It’s also a place that's almost impossible to escape.

In seeking real estate, General Zaroff explains: “So I bought this island, built this house, and here I do my hunting. The island is perfect for my purposes—there are jungles with a maze of traits in them, hills, swamps […]" (1.103)

The mysterious and complex setting directly serves Zaroff’s purposes. It’s a setting for booby traps and dead-ends, hiding and pouncing. But because Zaroff is so fixated on the island itself, and how to navigate it (he does have the advantage, after all), he doesn’t take into consideration that his prey might end up in the sea…

For more discussion of the enticing features of “Ship Trap” island, see our “Setting” section. If you want to read about how being set loose in the jungle is harder than fighting Germans in the trenches of World War I, see Rainsford’s “Character Analysis.”

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