Two weeks ago, I wrote a post about Eragon’s disability during the events of the second book, Eldest, in the Inheritance Cycle series. Originally, I had been torn between writing about that, or writing about whether or not Eragon is a sociopath or a psychopath. While I do believe that Eragon displays many sociopathic and psychopathic tendencies, at the same time, he was also written to be a hero, and so his character becomes confused due to the fact that Paolini tends to tell one thing and show the opposite. As such, Eragon is left with many conflicting personality quirks that make it hard to understand his character.
For example, Eragon seems to have no trouble killing other human beings, to the extent that he rarely has any kind of emotional response to the people’s he’s killed, but as of Eldest, he becomes a vegetarian, because killing animals for food is wrong.
So while Eragon comes across as a horrible murderer sometimes, other times he can come across as a relatively decent guy. Relatively.
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