Re: RARA-AVIS: Woolrich's FRIGHT

From: Patrick King ( abrasax93@yahoo.com)
Date: 14 Feb 2008


The most interesting aspect of the book to me, was the problems presented to a murderer who has not been detected. Many books seem to assume that if you've gotten away with a murder, one pretty much forgets the crime. For normal people, this cannot be true. Watching Marshall's paranoia destroy his life gave me a lot to think about regarding things I'm working on.

The second degree murderer who is not psychotic has an awful lot to process.

Patrick King
--- harry.lerner@mail.mcgill.ca wrote:

> Reading FRIGHT I find a number of passages seem very
> desolate and
> hopeless. For example, while Preston is on his
> honeymoon he deeply
> laments some recent actions of his. The couple of
> very brief chapters
> that deal with this are quite sparse in words but
> very expressive in
> their desolation. I wonder if this scene could be
> taken as good
> example of what Ross MacDonald once said as part of
> a talk he gave in
> 1954 at the University of Michigan. He was
> referring to Poe when he
> paraphrased Carlos Williams by saying that Poe was
> faced with "...the
> task of forging a means to express his sensibility,
> to objectify and
> artistically ameliorate the sense of guilt and
> horror which he
> perceived in himself and suffered, perhaps in poetic
> anticipation, for
> his society." Does this ring at all true in light
> of the insights we
> have been given on this list lately regarding
> Woolrich as a person and
> an author?
>
> Best,
> Harry
>
>
>

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