What matters to you most in life?
Avoid serious soul-searching and take this simple (bordering on idiotic) test (but it is kind of fun), courtesy of Paul Zindel’s “The Pigman”, which I read in the 8th grade:
There is a river with a bridge over it and a wife and her husband live in a house on one side. The wife has a lover who lives on the other side of the river, and the only way to get from one side of the river to the other is to walk across the bridge or to ask the boatman to take you. One day the husband tells his wife that he has to be gone all night to handle some business in a faraway town. The wife pleads with him to take her with him because she
knows if he doesn’t she will be unfaithful to him. The husband absolutely refuses to take her because she will only be in the way of his important business. So the husband goes alone. When he is gone, the wife goes over the bridge and stays with her lover. The night passes, and the sun is almost up when the wife leaves because she must get back to her own house before her husband gets home. She starts to cross the bridge, but she sees an assassin waiting for her on the other side, and she knows if she tries to cross, he will murder her. In terror, she runs up the side of the river and asks the boatman to take her across, but he wants fifty cents. She has no money, so he refuses to take her. The wife runs back to the lover’s house, and explains to him what her predicament is. She asks him for fifty cents to pay the boatman. The lover refuses, telling her it’s her own fault for getting into the situation. As dawn comes up, the wife is nearly out of her mind and decided to dash across the bridge. When she comes face to face with the assassin. He takes out a large knife and stabs her until she dies. Write down the names of the characters in the order in which you think they were most responsible for the wife’s death. Just list wife, husband, lover, assassin, and boatman in the order you think they are most guilty.
INTERPRETATION:
Each of the characters is a symbol for something and you have betrayed what is most important to you in life.
Wife= fun
Husband= love
Lover= sex
Assassin= money
Boatman= magic
Posted on October 30th, 2007 by JM
Cool! Im not sure I get it though.. did I betray fun??
I can’t tell from the passage whether the wife told her husband that she would cheat on him if he didn’t take her along, or just asked him to take her without explaining why. Seems like that would make a difference.
Assassin, wife, lover, boatman, husband..
Money, fun, sex, magic, love
Did I betray love? I’m confused.
Therefore if you thought that the lover was the most responsible then sex is the most important thing in your life. If you thought that the wife was second most responsible then fun is the second most important thing in your life and so on.