Through this masterful writing, Cook has recreated a mental picture of the dark spy and war dominated period of the early twentieth century, with great detail. The narration singles out many aspects of this period. Some of these include the characteristic dialogues that dominated the
God does not need my name nailed upon the church! God sees my name; God knows how black my sins are! It is enough!” John feels that confession should be private between a man and God. On the other hand, the public believes that there should be strong evidence confirming one’s confession.
These fictionalized accounts of a criminal investigation are provided to the public with the intention of gaining financial rewards through the mass production and consumption of entertainment. In appealing to this entertainment factor a myriad of components are considered in the development of crime films and literature. In Old City Hall, Rotenberg’s inclusion of multiple perspectives allows the readers to follow the thought process of the different components that make up the criminal justice system, including legal counsel, police officers, judges, forensic analysists and witnesses. For instance, Rotenberg mentions the techniques often used by both lawyers and detectives in carefully phrasing questions to get a response from a witness or suspect. “He knew what impressed judges and juries most was not a witness who simply read from the notebook, but one who genuinely tried to remember what it was he had seen and heard and felt” (Rotenberg, 2009, p. 247).
Capote introduces his unique shifting of perspectives framed with the structure of a narrated drama. Henceforth, the book progresses with an increasingly greater density of interrogative-to-declarative-sentence style. Beginning just after the first chapter, many of the passages appear to be transcriptions of real interviews or scripted derivations from police findings into the same form. This, in combination with the authenticity of the story helps to create a very vivid, visual, and often pedantic visuals to create a theme of connectedness in the construction of the timeline.
"...I sure as hell never murdered four people in cold blood." "Yeah and how about hanging the bastard? That's pretty goddam cold-blooded too." " (306). Statements like this, paired with other devices, cause the reader to question how ethical it was for these men to be
The written confession was used by
Accused were expected to confess to their crimes, and anyone who refused was
Now that he has told the court his sins, he yearns for that bit of pride to stay intact. With his patience thinning Proctor pleas, “ Is there no good penitence but it be public? Good does not need my name nailed upon the church” (1356). By refusing to renounce his name, Proctor redeems himself for his earlier silence and dies with integrity and honor. No matter his faults, John Proctor must keep his good name; it is all he has
MICHEL FOUCAULT ON SEXUALITY Michel Foucault was a French philosopher, philologist and social theorist. He made discourses on the relationship between power and knowledge and about how they are utilized as a form of social control through social establishments. This essay talks about Michel Foucault’s discourse on sexuality. He put forward his theory of the history of sexuality.
However, his true morals are revealed when the narrator shows signs of guilt like “My head ached, and I fancied a ringing in my ears.” The narrator’s transition from superiority to guilt represents the reality that the acknowledgement of wrongdoings can either be done consciously or unconsciously, and that the latter has considerable negative
Like Holmes, Poirot is a convincing spokesman for a rational (reasoned and unemotional) approach to solving mysteries” (1-2). When Agatha Christie was writing just like Conan Doyle, she also tried many different versions of detectives (“Agatha Christie Biography”
The authors of the Golden Age shows their faith and belief in the detectives (emphatically vulnerable detectives). The detectives in these stories dominate the plot and solve the mystery case by influencing the perspective of the reader. The detectives mostly are self-conscious and Golden Age does not expect the reader to solve the crime ahead of the detective. They are decidedly unaggressive, non-god like, nondominant and do not exude ‘macho-like’ qualities of a ‘real he-man’. In the Detective Fiction, detectives fall into three broad categories; amateurs, private investigators, and the professional police.
It is tradition of the genre to have an uncommonly smart detective as protagonist, alongside a mediocre partner who often articulates the mystery. It is made apparent to the readers that the narrator possesses no significant intellect, as in the Murders in the Rue Morgue, when asked his opinion on the murders; he says “I could merely agree with all Paris in considering them an insoluble mystery. I saw no means by which it would be possible to trace the
H. Auden, in an essay The Guilty Vicarage, describes how the detective novels depict not just one guilty criminal, but, by putting the of suspicion on each and every member of the closed society, marks each and every member as such. The detective, by identifying the criminal and purging them from the society absolves the guilt of the entire society. According to Auden, the detective absolves not just the suspects of their guilt, but provides the same absolution/salvation to the readers of detective fiction also. Auden thus, points out some of the more unwitting functions of detective fiction, that is, to work as a literary embodiment of a mechanism which assumes everybody to be guilty and thereby the need of subjecting all to confession. In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, once the confessions from all major characters is extracted, the most significant of all confessions still remains -- that of the murderer.
The dialogue of spy fiction’s role in regards to detective fiction does tie somewhat into realism, which is connected to the useful properties of American detective fiction. It still, however, stands apart because the focus is on the lack of realism and the glorification of violence. Though these things are not wholly removed from the topic at hand, the—fairly lengthy—discussion feels misplaced. The result of the long detour to spy fiction is that it is “no more a clouded mirror than any other” (9). While this conclusion is intriguing, it seems as though it could be another article in its own right, and it lessens the strength of the thesis.
