Good Essay About Ambition And Greed

The relationship between ambition and greed is explored in Mike Krath’s “An Ambitious Experiment”. The term ambitious is ambiguous in this title; for ambition usually has to do with self-betterment, whereas this experiment had to do with possible self-betterment while gambling the certain annihilation of the “self”.
The husband’s ambition is not clear: is he avoiding family or securing family? The elements of time travel add another dimension to this dilemma. The time travel adds an interesting element to Krath’s tale; it provides a dimension for reflection about whether the “ambition: of the husband is ever achieved.
When the wife asks the husband, “What if you can’t come back?” and he responds that: “I hope I have made the right choice.” illustrates the dichotomy between what the husband is supposedly after: the security for himself and his family in a 401K. He wants to travel to the future, at the expense of the present, to discover whether or not he made the right decisions about investing the 401K. The irony of this story is not lost; who cares about a 401K if one is not around to receive the benefits?
The husband’s apparent ambition is greed. He has no concern for the wife on his return; in fact, he kills her as a part of his experiment. If the husband were concerned about the objective of a 401K, to provide familial stability, her would not take this “risk” as part of his experiment. He would not take the gamble at all. But it is the greed of knowing for certain how to maximize the 401K that drives this husband to not only kill his wife, but eventually be killed himself.