Killer and Victim Relationships in Three Classic Horror Stories
This essay examines the relationship between killer and victim in three canonical American short stories: Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find," Joyce Carol Oates' "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?," and Edgar Allan Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado." Through close textual analysis, the paper argues that each story offers a distinct but complementary commentary on notoriety, morality, and inevitability. O'Connor frames the killer-victim dynamic through the lens of mother and son to implicate society in the creation of killers. Oates extends this by showing how society glamorizes killers, granting them celebrity-like power. Poe's first-person killer-narrator synthesizes both ideas, demonstrating an idealized killer who operates without restraint.
- Introduction: The Killer-Victim Relationship in Horror Fiction: Three stories linked by killer-victim conversations
- O'Connor and the Mother-Son Dynamic: Grandmother-Misfit dynamic mirrors mother and son
- Society as Parent: The Misfit's Rebellion: The Misfit challenges social institutions that shaped him
- Oates, Celebrity, and the Glamorization of Killers: Arnold Friend's power drawn from celebrity mystique
- Poe's Narrator and the Idealized Killer: First-person killer controls victim and reader alike
- Conclusion: Society, Culture, and the Making of Killers: Society produces and empowers killers across all three stories
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper constructs a unified comparative argument across three stories, showing how each one builds upon the last rather than treating them as isolated case studies.
- Close reading is consistently grounded in direct quotation, with textual evidence integrated naturally into the analytical prose rather than dropped in without context.
- The inclusion of real-world context — particularly the Charles Schmid source material for Arnold Friend — strengthens the paper's cultural argument without derailing the literary analysis.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates comparative literary analysis with a thematic through-line. Rather than analyzing each story separately, the writer identifies a shared structural feature — the killer-victim conversation — and uses it as a lens to draw progressively deeper conclusions about how literature reflects and reinforces cultural attitudes toward killers. Each story is treated as a variation on a central theme, with Poe's narrator serving as the culminating synthesis of arguments built through O'Connor and Oates.
Structure breakdown
The essay opens with a framing introduction that identifies the shared feature across all three texts. It then moves through each story in order of increasing complexity: O'Connor establishes the social-moral framework, Oates introduces the element of glamorization and celebrity, and Poe's first-person narration is used to synthesize both. The conclusion draws the three threads together into a unified claim about how cultural images of killers both reflect and enable real violence.
Introduction: The Killer-Victim Relationship in Horror Fiction
The relationship between killer and victim has been one of the most enduring topics throughout horror and suspense fiction, and it is this relationship which ties together three ostensibly distinct stories: Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find," Joyce Carol Oates' "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?," and Edgar Allan Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado." In each case, the majority of the story consists of the killer talking to his victim or victims, some of whom are unaware of their fate at the beginning of the conversation but who gradually come to realize the killer's true intention. The relationship which develops between killer and victim — however brief — in each story reveals something about how killers are treated by society as people, and within literature as characters and archetypes. Considering how each of these stories intersect and diverge in their treatment of the killer-victim relationship will demonstrate how each story interprets and comments upon popular notions of notoriety, morality, and inevitability.
O'Connor and the Mother-Son Dynamic
Flannery O'Connor's story is the ideal starting point for considering the relationship between killer and victim, because it actually duplicates that relationship in order to suggest that morality is a function of society, and furthermore, that societal influence is so strong it can predetermine behavior to the point that it appears inevitable. In a somewhat telling move, the first relationship that appears in "A Good Man is Hard to Find" is not between killer and victim, but rather mother and son, because the story opens with a disagreement between "the grandmother" and her son Bailey. The grandmother wants to visit "some of her connections in east Tennessee" while her son is determined to take the family on a vacation to Florida, and it is this oppositional relationship that mirrors the eventual relationship between the grandmother and her killer, the escaped convict who calls himself The Misfit (O'Connor 404). The two relationships are linked, because although The Misfit is ultimately the one who kills the grandmother, it is Bailey's decision to ignore the grandmother's concerns about the Misfit that leads to her eventual death. Recognizing that the killer-victim relationship in this story is grounded in the initial relationship between mother and son is important, because the grandmother's interactions with The Misfit increasingly take on the air of a mother talking to her rebellious son.
When the grandmother first sees The Misfit, she has "the peculiar feeling that the bespectacled man was someone she knew. His face was as familiar to her as if she had known him all her life," and indeed, after her initial shock at recognizing him as The Misfit, she immediately begins talking to him as if she knows him (O'Connor 407). She tells him that she just knows he is "a good man" and does not "look a bit like [he has] common blood" (O'Connor 407). She continues on, and although she is pleading for her life, her actual dialogue is that of a mother concerned for her son. Upon hearing about The Misfit's youth, the grandmother tells him to "think how wonderful it would be to settle down and live a comfortable life," as if The Misfit has merely lost his way, and just before she dies, she literally says, "why you're one of my babies. You're one of my own children!" (O'Connor 408, 413). The grandmother cannot interact with The Misfit in any way other than a mother would interact with her son, and this forces the reader to consider what the story is saying about upbringing. Furthermore, this consideration must extend to both the immediate family and society in general, because while the grandmother's dialogue is couched in the terms of a mother talking to her son, The Misfit's replies are directed not specifically at the grandmother but rather at the society that gave birth to him.
Works Cited
de Capell Brooke, Arthur. Sketches in Spain and Morocco: in two volumes: Volume 1. London: Colburn and Bentley, 1831.
Moser, Don. "The Pied Piper of Tuscon." Life. 4 Mar 1966: 19–24, 80. Print.
Oates, Joyce Carol. "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?." Literature for Composition. Ed. Sylvan Barnet, Ed. William Burto and Ed. William Cain. 9th ed. Toronto: Pearson Education Canada, 2010. 225–235. Print.
O'Connor, Flannery. "A Good Man is Hard to Find." Literature for Composition. Ed. Sylvan Barnet, Ed. William Burto and Ed. William Cain. 9th ed. Toronto: Pearson Education Canada, 2010. 404–413. Print.
Poe, Edgar Allan. "The Cask of Amontillado." Literature for Composition. Ed. Sylvan Barnet, Ed. William Burto and Ed. William Cain. 9th ed. Toronto: Pearson Education Canada, 2010. 157–162. Print.
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