Literary notes about brute (AI summary)
The term "brute" in literature is a multifaceted descriptor that can evoke images of raw savagery as well as a lack of refined intellect or emotional sophistication. Authors employ the word to characterize figures who embody physical strength, impulsive nature, or even animalistic behavior, as in portrayals of violent attackers or crude servants [1, 2]. At times, it is used metaphorically to highlight a deficiency in rational or moral faculties, contrasting the refined aspects of humanity with a more instinctual, unreasoned side [3, 4, 5]. In certain narratives, the term also carries a humorous or ironic tone, underlining the contradictions within a character’s persona or society’s expectations [6, 7]. Ultimately, "brute" functions as a literary tool to delineate the boundary between reason and raw, untamed force.
- There was the huge famished brute, its black muzzle buried in Rucastle’s throat, while he writhed and screamed upon the ground.
— from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle - Summer before last he was so unfortunate as to incur the displeasure of the overseer, a coarse, heartless brute, who whipped him most cruelly.
— from Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup - Take a Brute out of his Instinct, and you find him wholly deprived of Understanding.
— from The Spectator, Volume 1 by Joseph Addison and Sir Richard Steele - Why should a human being, deprived of his reason, ever become so brutal in character, as some do, unless he has the brute nature within him?"
— from The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals by Charles Darwin - In elevating us above the brute, it opens to us the possibility of failures to which the animal, limited to instinct, cannot sink.
— from How We Think by John Dewey - If he’s a rogue, she’ll vow he’s an angel; if he’s a brute, she will like him all the better for his ill-treatment of her.
— from Barry Lyndon by William Makepeace Thackeray - “I must be a brute, indeed, if I can be really ungrateful!” said she, in soliloquy.
— from Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
