Just for reference, we didn't have to revisit the thesis in the conclusion. Our teacher told us to write in more of a book report-type format.
Childhood Emotional Abuse in Red Dragon
Emotional abuse to a child is a very serious thing. It distorts and sometimes completely cripples the child’s sense of self, resulting in a socially compromised adult. This is extremely prevalent in the novel Red Dragon by Thomas Harris, in which Francis Dolarhyde, the novel’s main antagonist and serial killer, often reflects on a childhood of emotional abuse. In the book, he is emotionally abused by many authority figures in his early childhood, and suffers even further emotional abuse when he is adopted by his grandmother at a later age. The emotional abuse that Francis Dolarhyde suffers in Red Dragon is the source of his pathological tendencies and distorted sense of self as an adult.
The starts off from the point of view of Will Graham, an F.B.I. detective who retired after a near-death experience at the hands of Hannibal Lecter, an advisor of his who turned out to be the very serial killer they were looking for. He is being asked by Jack Crawford, another F.B.I. investigator, to help solve a couple of family murders that had recently happened. Graham reluctantly agrees, much to the dismay of his newfound wife and stepson. He discovers that in both events, seemingly random family homes had been broken into, and the family slaughtered. The dead children had been propped up on the wall in the parent’s bedrooms and had pieces of glass put into their eyes, which Graham decides is because the killer wants to feel like he has an audience while he mutilates and molests the mother’s body. The killer gains the nickname “Tooth Fairy” among the media and law enforcement agencies. The story also introduces side character Freddy Lounds, who is a journalist for a newspaper called The Tattler who published fake articles about Graham after his incident with Hannibal Lecter. Graham despises Lounds, who attempts to get inside information on the investigation by posing as the Tooth Fairy over the phone, but is caught. Graham and Crawford decide to use this to their advantage, and force Lounds to publish a false article saying that the Tooth Fairy is an insecure, closeted homosexual in an attempt to anger him and get him to come after Graham, in which they would be able to arrest him. The Tooth Fairy (who, in the book, is revealed to be film developer Francis Dolarhyde) kidnaps Lounds and confronts him. He glues Lounds to a rolling chair and in his confrontation states,
“You said that I, who see more than you, am insane. I, who pushed the world so much further than you, am insane. I have dared more than you, I have pressed my unique seal so much deeper, where it will last longer than your dust. Your life to mine is a slug track on stone. A thin silver mucus track in and out of the letters on my monument… Fear is not what you owe me, Lounds. You owe me awe. (Harris 198)”
Dolarhyde then forces Lounds to record a voice message in which he praises Dolarhyde as the “Great Red Dragon” who deserves great praise and attention; after which Dolarhyde bites off Lounds’ lips, transports him to the city, sets him on fire and rolls him down the street towards The Tattler’s main building. The book then continues from the point of view of Dolarhyde, who often has flashbacks of his abusive childhood. He was born with a severe cleft lip, and given up for adoption by his mother. He is partially raised in an orphanage, where he experiences isolation from the other kids because of his lip and near inability to speak. When Dolarhyde’s grandmother learns of his existence, she goes to the orphanage and adopts him. She then uses the child as a revenge pawn against her estranged daughter; she brings Francis to all of the political rallies of her son-in-law and introduces him as the illegitimate child of the politician’s wife, causing him to lose. Francis is then raised by his grandmother, who verbally abuses him as a “filthy beast” and even threatens to cut off his penis for wetting his bed. His grandmother becomes increasingly senile until she is finally taken to a mental facility and Francis is sent to live with his mother and her new family. His stepsiblings blame him for their father’s downfall, and often beat him because of it. Francis is sent to an orphanage again when he kills his stepsister’s cat. He then goes into the military where they surgically repair his lip, and after he serves in the military he becomes a film developer. He discovers the painting “The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun” and feels a profound emotional attachment to it, feeling that he can “transform” into the Dragon if he can absorb the life energy of those he kills. He then meets Reba McClane, a blind film developer from another facility. They begin to date, but Dolarhyde feels vulnerable being so close to another living person. While in bed with her, he “held with her in this one bubbleskin of time, he felt for the first time that it was all right; it was his life he was releasing, himself past all mortality that he was sending into her starry darkness, away from this pain planet, ringing harmonic distances away to peace and the promise of rest. (Harris 198)” His confusion causes a personality split in his psyche, between himself and what he imagines to be the “Dragon”, which talks in a similar fashion to his grandmother. In an attempt to control the “Dragon” part of his personality, he goes to the museum where the original painting of the Great Red Dragon is stored. He poses as an academic and ends up eating the painting, which gives him the “power to choose”. However, while he did this, Graham discovered that the two families that had been killed used the same film development company, and believes that whoever killed them had to work there because the killer had already know the layouts of their houses. He goes to the company to investigate, and is seen by Dolarhyde, who escaped the building unseen and flees. He then gives his body permanently to the “Dragon”, who persuades him that he can get them out of the situation alive. The Dragon then goes to Reba’s house, kills a man who had given her a ride home, and kidnaps her. He takes her to his house and acts like he is Francis, even though the Dragon is in control the whole time. He makes a big deal out of killing her, but decides instead to burn the house down and kill himself. Because Reba is blind, she doesn’t know that he actually shot the other man’s body again and silently left the burning house, so that she could report to the police that he was dead. Graham is satisfied, believing that Dolarhyde is dead, and goes back to his family in Florida. However, while fishing with his family on a lake, they are attacked by Dolarhyde. Dolarhyde stabs Graham in the face, but has a fishing hook caught in his head by Molly, Graham’s wife. Molly and her son escape to the house and wait for Dolarhyde to come in, and when he does Molly shoots him seven times in the head. The novel concludes with Graham in the hospital recovering from his face wound, reflecting on life in general.
Dolarhyde’s emotional abuse as a child was extensive. When his grandmother first met him at the orphanage and realized he could barely speak, she asked if he could pronounce his name. “The child’s face brightened. The big boys had helped him with this. He wanted to please. He collected himself. ‘Cunt Face,’ he said. (Harris 198)” This shows how he was socially outcast by the other orphans, and felt separated from a young age. In the book it says “He had known since the age of nine that essentially he was alone and would always be alone, a conclusion more common to the forties. (Harris 221)” He went on to face extensive emotional abuse from his grandmother, who as previously stated treated him like a “filthy beast” and used extreme measures to conform Francis’ behavior to her wishes. It may be because of this emotional abuse that Francis went on to become a psychopath. He showed all the signs of a psychopath, from the torture of animals as a child to the incredible sense of self-worth as an adult, even though he got this sense of self-worth vicariously through the Dragon. When analyzing Dolarhyde, Dr. Bloom refers to him as “…the child of a nightmare. (Harris 159).” Dolarhyde was able to rationalize his killings by dehumanizing his victims. While writing a letter to Hannibal Lecter, “Dolarhyde felt that Lecter knew the unreality of people who die to help you in these things – understood quickly that they are not flesh, but light and air and color and quick sounds quickly ended when you change them. Like balloons of color bursting. That they are more important for the changing, more important than the lives they scrobble after, pleading. (Harris 99)” Had Dolarhyde not been subjected to emotional abuse as child, he wouldn’t have turned to a fictional figure (the dragon) as a figure to aspire to. He wouldn’t have felt a need to “change” himself into something greater, something he perceived as worthwhile.
I found Red Dragon to be a fascinating book. I was already familiar with Thomas Harris’ work, having read and seen The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal Rising, and seen the film adaptation of Red Dragon. I found the book to be far superior to the movie, unlike The Silence of the Lambs, which I thought had an excellent film adaptation. I would definitely recommend it to those who enjoy psychological thrillers and don’t mind a lot of filler between important events.
lol it's fine. my mom is an unemployed teacher so she jumps at any opportunity to scrutinize my work that she can. she'll spend like an hour on each paragraph though.
Just finished this. There may be typos, but I'll iron them out when I print it in a few hours.
The Never-Ending Universal Human Narrative
In most cases, literature is seen as a finite concept. Literature has a beginning, middle, and end which have all been constructed by an author. The author may have a slight plan for her characters, but generally she has a has an endgame in sight. In Magdalena Tulli’s Flaw, this is not the case. In Flaw, Tulli brings into the question the notion of authorship and finite endings by deploying the theory of time immemorial. Tulli toys with the idea of responsibility in an explosive, fluid style of narrative that is tough to assign a single author authorship.
While reading Tulli’s Flaw, the reader feels caught up in the story from the beginning, complicit in the tale’s inception. Tulli starts her narrative with the use of a tailor, shaping the characters and props as if he had no choice given the materials he was provided, “The work of the shears is irreversible, and no alterations can be made. The designs contain the entire truth, both that which it behooves everyone to believe and that which no one can be bothered to check.” (pg. 10). Intrigued instantly, the reader feels as if she is part of the mechanism using the shears to construct the characters. The overarching grandness of the tale of construction is further highlighted by the thought that the tale has gone on and will continue to go on, regardless of the actual story. This is evident in the line “the world was not created yesterday--that since time immemorial there have existed the same magnificent elevations…” (pgs. 16-17). There are only a limited amount of stories that can be told with the same stage, in this case an unnamed, seemingly earthly city, that only the players can be altered to make the tale different.
The overseeing eye of the novel lends the feeling that the events are happening now, that the reader is the overseeing eye, more so than that of a normal omniscient point of view. An example of this can be caught right before the arrival of the refugees in the novel, “No eye will linger over them anyway. The gaze will rather be drawn towards the gaudy pennants jutting from the rows of windows painted on the plywood. This distant view was not without influence on the course of events…” (pg. 61). We, the reader, are told that our view has meaning, influence. The reader having sway in the narrative is somewhat of an unsettling innovation. Even without the atrocities that are almost executed in Flaw, a reader generally desires to be lead through a story to escape her daily life, maybe to learn about another culture or topic that she never deemed in her skill set. By setting up the reader as an active participant, Tulli causes the reader to shift uncomfortably in her chair because she is forced to contemplate whether or not she is actually capable of performing the acts laid out in the novel.
The question of “Who is to blame for this?” is brought into play beautifully in Flaw. Without naming the city or the population in the novel, Tulli gives the strife indicated a universal feel. Tulli writes “In that place it becomes evident that life is a joke and death has no meaning, rendered buoyant as it is by large numbers.” (pg. 157). In what place has death no meaning? Who or what is in large numbers? No clear definition is offered without the narrative. While scary, this is a gripping device used to jolt into being what is around us. Can we envision ourselves planning the death of people around us? Can we justify looking the other way while someone else plans the death of humans? Without laying name to the exact killer and targets, Tulli causes us to question our own level of compassion and humanity. We as readers feel kinship to such statements as “Things have gone so far that I have no other way out than to admit I belong to this crowd, and to shoulder the troublesome burden of affiliation. There is no escaping it.” (pg. 158). Even though it is unknowable without action whether or not a person is capable of committing bad deeds or standing by silent, the seed of doubt is planted in the reader’s mind. The reader sees the possibilities abound around her. If this group showed up, what would I do to remedy the situation? Would I help a stranded family by giving them warm soup and a roof too sleep under or will I send my son to help round them up into a common place of holding? All these paths are explored through the narrative style in Tulli’s novel. We are frightened into thinking that we might be “prepared to do whatever it took to achieve an end that justified the means…” (pg. 145).
The multiplicity of the characters in a fixed setting engineered within Flaw give a wide range a points of view, offering many mindsets to identify with, with the exception of the point of view of a victim. Tulli assigns characters that can be seen in any society at any time period, such as the notary, “It [an office] is assumed to have existed since time immemorial, at the very least since when the notary married his boss’s somewhat unstable daughter, in this manner becoming a partner.” (pg. 33). Or a student, which every person goes through at some point, “Even if the student flunked his Roman Law exam yesterday, he already managed to forget about it, because afterwards he put his heart and soul into roaming the streets all day with his pals,…” (pg. 21). Tulli offers characters that even though they have a fixed identity, as a notary or a student, they have the potential to do something more with their lives, thus drawing a likeness to any reader. Tulli could have written the student as someone that sobers up and marries the maid, making her life complete with a successful lawyer for a husband or written the notary’s wife as stable and his office with an identifiable mark, but instead Tulli weaves the character’s lives so that they can play out a truth that cannot be said by banal happy endings that every person wishes for. The characters had to possess the ability to fall so that the readers could see themselves within the characters since problems always arise, causing a variation in dreams. By her narrative style of entering the heads of the characters as they make life changing decisions, Tulli effectively causing the reader to feel like she is in fact making the decision for the character, writing the story herself.
Comments
Childhood Emotional Abuse in Red Dragon
Emotional abuse to a child is a very serious thing. It distorts and sometimes completely cripples the child’s sense of self, resulting in a socially compromised adult. This is extremely prevalent in the novel Red Dragon by Thomas Harris, in which Francis Dolarhyde, the novel’s main antagonist and serial killer, often reflects on a childhood of emotional abuse. In the book, he is emotionally abused by many authority figures in his early childhood, and suffers even further emotional abuse when he is adopted by his grandmother at a later age. The emotional abuse that Francis Dolarhyde suffers in Red Dragon is the source of his pathological tendencies and distorted sense of self as an adult.
The starts off from the point of view of Will Graham, an F.B.I. detective who retired after a near-death experience at the hands of Hannibal Lecter, an advisor of his who turned out to be the very serial killer they were looking for. He is being asked by Jack Crawford, another F.B.I. investigator, to help solve a couple of family murders that had recently happened. Graham reluctantly agrees, much to the dismay of his newfound wife and stepson. He discovers that in both events, seemingly random family homes had been broken into, and the family slaughtered. The dead children had been propped up on the wall in the parent’s bedrooms and had pieces of glass put into their eyes, which Graham decides is because the killer wants to feel like he has an audience while he mutilates and molests the mother’s body. The killer gains the nickname “Tooth Fairy” among the media and law enforcement agencies. The story also introduces side character Freddy Lounds, who is a journalist for a newspaper called The Tattler who published fake articles about Graham after his incident with Hannibal Lecter. Graham despises Lounds, who attempts to get inside information on the investigation by posing as the Tooth Fairy over the phone, but is caught. Graham and Crawford decide to use this to their advantage, and force Lounds to publish a false article saying that the Tooth Fairy is an insecure, closeted homosexual in an attempt to anger him and get him to come after Graham, in which they would be able to arrest him. The Tooth Fairy (who, in the book, is revealed to be film developer Francis Dolarhyde) kidnaps Lounds and confronts him. He glues Lounds to a rolling chair and in his confrontation states,
“You said that I, who see more than you, am insane. I, who pushed the world so much further than you, am insane. I have dared more than you, I have pressed my unique seal so much deeper, where it will last longer than your dust. Your life to mine is a slug track on stone. A thin silver mucus track in and out of the letters on my monument… Fear is not what you owe me, Lounds. You owe me awe. (Harris 198)”
Dolarhyde then forces Lounds to record a voice message in which he praises Dolarhyde as the “Great Red Dragon” who deserves great praise and attention; after which Dolarhyde bites off Lounds’ lips, transports him to the city, sets him on fire and rolls him down the street towards The Tattler’s main building. The book then continues from the point of view of Dolarhyde, who often has flashbacks of his abusive childhood. He was born with a severe cleft lip, and given up for adoption by his mother. He is partially raised in an orphanage, where he experiences isolation from the other kids because of his lip and near inability to speak. When Dolarhyde’s grandmother learns of his existence, she goes to the orphanage and adopts him. She then uses the child as a revenge pawn against her estranged daughter; she brings Francis to all of the political rallies of her son-in-law and introduces him as the illegitimate child of the politician’s wife, causing him to lose. Francis is then raised by his grandmother, who verbally abuses him as a “filthy beast” and even threatens to cut off his penis for wetting his bed. His grandmother becomes increasingly senile until she is finally taken to a mental facility and Francis is sent to live with his mother and her new family. His stepsiblings blame him for their father’s downfall, and often beat him because of it. Francis is sent to an orphanage again when he kills his stepsister’s cat. He then goes into the military where they surgically repair his lip, and after he serves in the military he becomes a film developer. He discovers the painting “The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun” and feels a profound emotional attachment to it, feeling that he can “transform” into the Dragon if he can absorb the life energy of those he kills. He then meets Reba McClane, a blind film developer from another facility. They begin to date, but Dolarhyde feels vulnerable being so close to another living person. While in bed with her, he “held with her in this one bubbleskin of time, he felt for the first time that it was all right; it was his life he was releasing, himself past all mortality that he was sending into her starry darkness, away from this pain planet, ringing harmonic distances away to peace and the promise of rest. (Harris 198)” His confusion causes a personality split in his psyche, between himself and what he imagines to be the “Dragon”, which talks in a similar fashion to his grandmother. In an attempt to control the “Dragon” part of his personality, he goes to the museum where the original painting of the Great Red Dragon is stored. He poses as an academic and ends up eating the painting, which gives him the “power to choose”. However, while he did this, Graham discovered that the two families that had been killed used the same film development company, and believes that whoever killed them had to work there because the killer had already know the layouts of their houses. He goes to the company to investigate, and is seen by Dolarhyde, who escaped the building unseen and flees. He then gives his body permanently to the “Dragon”, who persuades him that he can get them out of the situation alive. The Dragon then goes to Reba’s house, kills a man who had given her a ride home, and kidnaps her. He takes her to his house and acts like he is Francis, even though the Dragon is in control the whole time. He makes a big deal out of killing her, but decides instead to burn the house down and kill himself. Because Reba is blind, she doesn’t know that he actually shot the other man’s body again and silently left the burning house, so that she could report to the police that he was dead. Graham is satisfied, believing that Dolarhyde is dead, and goes back to his family in Florida. However, while fishing with his family on a lake, they are attacked by Dolarhyde. Dolarhyde stabs Graham in the face, but has a fishing hook caught in his head by Molly, Graham’s wife. Molly and her son escape to the house and wait for Dolarhyde to come in, and when he does Molly shoots him seven times in the head. The novel concludes with Graham in the hospital recovering from his face wound, reflecting on life in general.
“Dolarhyde felt that Lecter knew the unreality of people who die to help you in these things – understood quickly that they are not flesh, but light and air and color and quick sounds quickly ended when you change them. Like balloons of color bursting. That they are more important for the changing, more important than the lives they scrobble after, pleading. (Harris 99)”
Had Dolarhyde not been subjected to emotional abuse as child, he wouldn’t have turned to a fictional figure (the dragon) as a figure to aspire to. He wouldn’t have felt a need to “change” himself into something greater, something he perceived as worthwhile.
I found Red Dragon to be a fascinating book. I was already familiar with Thomas Harris’ work, having read and seen The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal Rising, and seen the film adaptation of Red Dragon. I found the book to be far superior to the movie, unlike The Silence of the Lambs, which I thought had an excellent film adaptation. I would definitely recommend it to those who enjoy psychological thrillers and don’t mind a lot of filler between important events.
The Never-Ending Universal Human Narrative
In most cases, literature is seen as a finite concept. Literature has a beginning, middle, and end which have all been constructed by an author. The author may have a slight plan for her characters, but generally she has a has an endgame in sight. In Magdalena Tulli’s Flaw, this is not the case. In Flaw, Tulli brings into the question the notion of authorship and finite endings by deploying the theory of time immemorial. Tulli toys with the idea of responsibility in an explosive, fluid style of narrative that is tough to assign a single author authorship.
While reading Tulli’s Flaw, the reader feels caught up in the story from the beginning, complicit in the tale’s inception. Tulli starts her narrative with the use of a tailor, shaping the characters and props as if he had no choice given the materials he was provided, “The work of the shears is irreversible, and no alterations can be made. The designs contain the entire truth, both that which it behooves everyone to believe and that which no one can be bothered to check.” (pg. 10). Intrigued instantly, the reader feels as if she is part of the mechanism using the shears to construct the characters. The overarching grandness of the tale of construction is further highlighted by the thought that the tale has gone on and will continue to go on, regardless of the actual story. This is evident in the line “the world was not created yesterday--that since time immemorial there have existed the same magnificent elevations…” (pgs. 16-17). There are only a limited amount of stories that can be told with the same stage, in this case an unnamed, seemingly earthly city, that only the players can be altered to make the tale different.
The overseeing eye of the novel lends the feeling that the events are happening now, that the reader is the overseeing eye, more so than that of a normal omniscient point of view. An example of this can be caught right before the arrival of the refugees in the novel, “No eye will linger over them anyway. The gaze will rather be drawn towards the gaudy pennants jutting from the rows of windows painted on the plywood. This distant view was not without influence on the course of events…” (pg. 61). We, the reader, are told that our view has meaning, influence. The reader having sway in the narrative is somewhat of an unsettling innovation. Even without the atrocities that are almost executed in Flaw, a reader generally desires to be lead through a story to escape her daily life, maybe to learn about another culture or topic that she never deemed in her skill set. By setting up the reader as an active participant, Tulli causes the reader to shift uncomfortably in her chair because she is forced to contemplate whether or not she is actually capable of performing the acts laid out in the novel.
The question of “Who is to blame for this?” is brought into play beautifully in Flaw. Without naming the city or the population in the novel, Tulli gives the strife indicated a universal feel. Tulli writes “In that place it becomes evident that life is a joke and death has no meaning, rendered buoyant as it is by large numbers.” (pg. 157). In what place has death no meaning? Who or what is in large numbers? No clear definition is offered without the narrative. While scary, this is a gripping device used to jolt into being what is around us. Can we envision ourselves planning the death of people around us? Can we justify looking the other way while someone else plans the death of humans? Without laying name to the exact killer and targets, Tulli causes us to question our own level of compassion and humanity. We as readers feel kinship to such statements as “Things have gone so far that I have no other way out than to admit I belong to this crowd, and to shoulder the troublesome burden of affiliation. There is no escaping it.” (pg. 158). Even though it is unknowable without action whether or not a person is capable of committing bad deeds or standing by silent, the seed of doubt is planted in the reader’s mind. The reader sees the possibilities abound around her. If this group showed up, what would I do to remedy the situation? Would I help a stranded family by giving them warm soup and a roof too sleep under or will I send my son to help round them up into a common place of holding? All these paths are explored through the narrative style in Tulli’s novel. We are frightened into thinking that we might be “prepared to do whatever it took to achieve an end that justified the means…” (pg. 145).
The multiplicity of the characters in a fixed setting engineered within Flaw give a wide range a points of view, offering many mindsets to identify with, with the exception of the point of view of a victim. Tulli assigns characters that can be seen in any society at any time period, such as the notary, “It [an office] is assumed to have existed since time immemorial, at the very least since when the notary married his boss’s somewhat unstable daughter, in this manner becoming a partner.” (pg. 33). Or a student, which every person goes through at some point, “Even if the student flunked his Roman Law exam yesterday, he already managed to forget about it, because afterwards he put his heart and soul into roaming the streets all day with his pals,…” (pg. 21). Tulli offers characters that even though they have a fixed identity, as a notary or a student, they have the potential to do something more with their lives, thus drawing a likeness to any reader. Tulli could have written the student as someone that sobers up and marries the maid, making her life complete with a successful lawyer for a husband or written the notary’s wife as stable and his office with an identifiable mark, but instead Tulli weaves the character’s lives so that they can play out a truth that cannot be said by banal happy endings that every person wishes for. The characters had to possess the ability to fall so that the readers could see themselves within the characters since problems always arise, causing a variation in dreams. By her narrative style of entering the heads of the characters as they make life changing decisions, Tulli effectively causing the reader to feel like she is in fact making the decision for the character, writing the story herself.
(continued...)