Challenge for Textual Evidence
By: NATALIE HERKLOTZ, Abby Green, and Leah Cole
Prompt
Passage
Eric penned nearly a dozen new journal entries in the next two months. "I have a goal to destroy as much as possible," he wrote, "so I must not be sidetracked by my feelings of sympathy, mercy, or any of that.'"It was a mark of Eric's ruthlessness that he comprehended the pain and consciously fought the urge to spare it. "I will force myself to believe that everyone is just another monster from Doom," he wrote. "I have to turn off my feelings." Keep one thing in mind, he said: he wanted to burn the world. That would be hard. He had begun producing the explosives, and it was a lot of work. Ten pipe bombs and ten puny crickets after two days' effort. Those would not destroy much. "God I want to torch and level everything in this whole area," he said, "but bombs of that size are hard to make."