Manliness and Murder in Andre Dubus's "Killings"
This essay examines Andre Dubus's short story "Killings" through the lens of masculinity and virtue, arguing that neither Matt nor Strout represents true manliness despite both committing murder in the name of perceived rights. Drawing on the Latin roots of "virility" and "virtue," the essay contends that genuine manliness requires virtuous, outward-looking behavior — a quality entirely absent from this blue-collar New England community. By comparing the two killers' motives (possessiveness versus grief-driven vengeance) and invoking the parallel of Shakespeare's Macbeths, the paper demonstrates how Dubus uses an atonal narrative style to show that both men are ultimately diminished, not ennobled, by their acts of violence.
- Introduction: A Community Without Justice: Setting, thesis, and the meaning of manliness
- Strout's Manliness as Sexual Virility: Strout's possessiveness and unrepentant self-centeredness
- Matt's Vengeance and the Limits of Virtue: Matt's murder mirroring Strout's selfishness
- The Neutering of Matt: Masculinity Lost: Matt's lost identity and virility after killing
- Conclusion: Self-Interest Versus True Manliness: Both men diminished; community not a theater of war
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What makes this paper effective
- The essay grounds its central argument in etymology — tracing "virility" and "virtue" to the Latin vir — giving the analysis a precise, philosophically coherent framework rather than relying on vague cultural assumptions about masculinity.
- The comparison to Shakespeare's Macbeth is well-integrated: it is invoked as a structural parallel (murder that destroys rather than elevates) rather than as mere name-dropping.
- The close reading of the story's final passage, where Matt cannot make love to his wife, is handled with strong analytical payoff — the physical incapacity is read as symbolic castration, directly linking theme to textual evidence.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates thematic close reading supported by etymology. By unpacking the Latin root shared by "virility" and "virtue," the writer builds a definitional argument that allows both characters to be evaluated against the same moral standard — a technique that turns a linguistic observation into the paper's governing analytical lens.
Structure breakdown
The essay opens with a thesis-rich introduction that situates the story's setting and stakes, then dedicates separate body sections to Strout's motive and Matt's motive before converging on the shared consequence: neither man retains genuine manliness. A brief literary allusion (Macbeth) broadens the claim before the textual quotation and its analysis deliver the emotional and argumentative climax. The conclusion restates the thesis in sharpened form, ending with a community-versus-war-theater contrast that gives the argument resonance beyond the text itself.
Introduction: A Community Without Justice
"Killings" by Andre Dubus is set in a blue-collar New England town along the Merrimack River. It presents a vision of a somewhat isolated community — outside of time, unsupported by any meaningful sense of law, order, or justice. Murder essentially goes unpunished, which is why the main character, Matt, takes the "law" into his own hands and murders Strout, the man who killed his son. Matt, accustomed to taking matters into his own hands as a man from a blue-collar town, feels justified in this killing — just as justified as Strout felt in killing Matt's son, who was sleeping with Strout's estranged wife.
While Strout's killing of Frank was based on passion — Strout's desire to repossess his wife and allow no other man to have her — Matt's killing of Strout is based on grief and a desire for vengeance (his son is dead, yet Strout is free to walk the streets and be with a woman). In this context, it is inappropriate to argue that either Strout or Matt is the more manly of the two, since manliness, or virility, comes from the Latin vir, meaning "man," which is also the root word of virtue — a habit of acting that is both good and manly. Which of these characters can be called good if both view murder as justified because of their own personal grievances, whether possessive or vengeful?
The answer is that neither is truly manly, because neither acts out of a habit of virtue but rather out of a habit of selfishness. Matt believes he has earned some peace in his twilight years; Strout believes he had every right to protect what was "his." Neither man sees the world from outside himself. This is the central problem of the story — a lack of real manliness. The men are driven by aims that are not genuinely manly, yet each believes he is acting rightly, based on mistaken and preconceived notions that manliness is about what one deserves: Strout "deserves" to have his family back; Matt "deserves" peace and will not let Strout disturb it. Meanwhile, real manliness is missing from the story and is only sensed by its notable absence — for instance, when Matt realizes at the end that he cannot make love to his wife, having literally lost his virility upon committing murder. This essay examines how Matt and Strout represent different aspects of "modern" manliness and how Dubus demonstrates that actual, virtuous manliness is absent from this small town through a style of writing that is atonal and unorthodox.
Works Cited
Dubus, Andre. "Killings." Web. 12 October 2015. <http://www.rehobothlibrary.org/images/02_Killings.pdf>
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