ENG 112 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Typical Male, Richard Slotkin, Noble Savage
10 Sep 2017
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The lapses in reacher"s detective skills are a useful plot device, because they require reacher to resort to violence (as heroes of thrillers often do). Killing floor"s crime, like the crime in most crime fiction, is a metaphor for an underlying social problem. Reacher solves the problem by becoming the ideal man . A violent climax is a key convention of american myth, one rooted in racist perceptions of native americans. Although killing floor is not about native americans, it does include the problematic myth of an authentic other through whom white heroes define themselves. Whodunit- a story where the identity of the murderer isn"t revealed till the end. In the essay the typology of detective fiction, literary critic tzvetan todorov says that a whodunit contains two stories: the story of the crime and the story of the investigation (44) The whodunit keeps these stories entirely separate. Often, the crime occurs before the whodunit even begins.
