Background of the Study

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CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

A. Background of the Study

Literature is creative imagination which expresses the thought, feeling and idea about life. It talks about love, hatred, happiness, sadness, war, and peace. Literature is something that reflects society, makes people think about themselves and their society. It usually allows people to enjoy language and beauty. It is used to describe anything from creative writing, but the term is most commonly used to refer of the creative imagination, such as poetries, dramas, and novel. The readers usually learn about literature and enjoying the atmosphere of it. One of the creative imaginative works is a novel. “Novels have been specially crafted and constructed. Any novel, therefore, can be described as a world specially made in words by an author. Any novel exists in the way it does because an author has chosen to put it together in that particular way” Gill, 1995:105. A novel has many fantasies. Novel is interesting because it can make the reader continue to read it. Novel usually makes the readers surprised in some way. There are two kinds of the novel, fiction and non – fiction. Blind Eye is the non-fiction novel that has a terrifying story about a doctor named Michael Swango who got away with murder. According to Duke, nonfiction novel is telling of an event or series of event that have occurred. The non-fiction novel is about the real event and people, written based on the novel. The nonfiction novel presents facts, describes true-life experiences, or discusses ideas. It writes about something factual, rather than fiction. The story of nonfiction novel cannot be manipulated by the writer’s imagination. The writer of nonfiction novel has specific information or ideas to convey the story. This makes the non-fiction genre rather flexible. Blind Eye presents the main character that has unusual behavior in the social, family, career, and the main characte r’s life. The main character is a doctor named Michael Swango who murdered more than thirty five patients and gave the poison to paramedics and his girlfriends. Michael Swango always killed by using poison. Michael Swango looked calm and acted like he did not kill people. Michael Swango felt satisfied when he did that. Nobody believed that a doctor who was young and handsome could be a serial killer. Wherever he practiced, he looked like an ideal doctor until the discovery of the mysterious death. Strangely, he always got away with murder. He moved to the hospital in Zimbabwe after no hospital in America wanted to employ him. There were still many victims in Zimbabwe. Michael Swango pursued the world of medicine for fifteen years, and Michael Swango had the strong ambition with the sadistic death. Most of the novels are designed to focus on history and the individual with the problems in society. “A character is someone in literary work who has some sort of identit y it needn’t be a strong one, an identify which is made up by appearance, conversation, action, name, and possibly thoughts going on the head” Gill, 1995:127. A character is a person in a literary work. The authors present the characters in society and show the action of their characters. “Characters are what they are like because of the way they’ve been made. The kind of conversation they have, the things they do, their appearances and so on are the particular ways in which the author has chosen to characterize his or her character.” Gill, 1995:127. The characteristics of the people in the novel are not always good; there are characteristics of the people that are bad. The good characteristics are remembered in terms of the good that they do, their achievement or sacrifice. The bad characteristics are usually remembered for the terrible things that they do and make damages to other people and themselves. The behavior of the people includes all those aspects of human activity which the writer can observe. That is why literature is considered as one interesting thing to choose in this thesis. There is not just one factor that influences the characteristics of the people. The hundreds of different involvements of people’s experience throughout life will develop the unique personality of the people. Throughout people’s lifespan, there are many experiences that may compel them to change themselves. There are hundreds of factors that develop and create what people know as identity. People are not instinctively born with an attraction to certain things, people are taught by other people around us. The writer chooses the factor that shaped the main character and the main character personality especially in the case of the psychopath in the Blind Eye because this novel talked about the murder was done by the doctor. The other reason is because Michael Swango, no one could believe that the handsome young doctor might be a serial killer. Wherever he is hired in Ohio, Illinois, New York, South Dakota, Michael Swango at the first seems the model physician then his patients begin dying.

B. Problem Formulation