The very short story, “The Betrayal” explores what happens when a person loses their morality. We read about a man and woman that are consumed with their love for one another, and wish to conceive a child to make their love flesh and blood. They love and nurture their son; they teach him to love others, and encourage him to go out into the world and rebuild “cities destroyed by violence and oppression” (Tadjo 866). The son, having been raised in such a happy and optimistic environment goes out into the world, but descends into a state of hopelessness after witnessing the despair in the world. While feeling such emotions he falls in love with an innocent woman who comes to trust him. Filled with desire to have her, he drugs her drink, and then…show more content… I believe that the first betrayal was done by the parents of the son. Though they had prepared him to believe in himself, and to love others, they hadn’t ensured that he had fully grasped to concept of humility or selflessness. The second betrayal was that of the people’s. In the story it says that the people “…had lost faith. They spoke of freedom and change, but these were empty words” (Tadjo 866). The people had betrayed themselves, their families, and their futures. By not having hope they were not looking ahead for good things, but looking into the now at all the negative, and missing anything positive. The son let this way of thinking, this pessimism, change him. This is the third betrayal; the son’s betrayal of his, and his parents’ values and beliefs. By letting the misery and viciousness of the people affect him, he turned his back of his upbringing, and become the opposite of what his parents had wanted for him. They had wished for him to be a beacon of hope, a physical representation of their love, and instead he had become an example of what happens when you go astray in life. The fourth betrayal was when he rapes the woman. She trusted him, and be betrays that in order to possess what he believed he had to have. He stripped from her her innocence, making her like him, and all the others that lacked hope and purity. He took from her what was not his to take, and ruined that which cannot be