Blog #3- Evil Iago

Before reading Othello, I thought I had a pretty good idea of what evil was. Sure... like Batman and the joker right? But I was mistakin'. Iago is the epitome of evil. Unlike the guy in the skittles commercial where everything he touches turns to skittles, it seems as though everything Iago got involved in was utterly destroyed.

Never before had I heard of a villain with such a defined chess set, where every person in the whole play was literally his pawn.

The one part of Iago's evilness that most impressed me was his rationalization to his inner self. Sure, he knew everything he was doing was evil, he referenced himself as the devil, but he would tell himself lies enough to almost make them seem true. That aspect of his persona was unlike any other villain that I had heard of before.

His being is so evil that he did all of this merely because he wasn't second in command. Out of his bitterness he murdered, both emotionally and literally, everyone in the play.

This term moral pyromaniac is so perfect for Iago that I wish I had thought of it myself. What some people might not understand is that this term would never be obtainable unless the possessor of it was that much smarter than everyone around him. Iago was the only character in the play that I knew what was going on. You had dumb ass Roderigo, who was an actual idiot, the lovestruck make-me-want-to-puke-my-brains-out Othello, and his beau, Desdemona, who was basically Othello's love slave throughout the whole play. Iago was the only character who understood how to manipulate these traits of the characters and set fire to everything.

Iago was the moral pyromaniac because he didn't even have morals to begin with. He knew he was evil, he knew he was the devil, but he kept telling himself what he wanted to hear until it sounded true. Iago showed at the end of the day, brains will always win over brawn, and that the idea of "good" is much more simple and easier to be manipulated than the cunning force of pure, hellish evil.