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“This sense of the law’s inadequacy …….generated a rich tradition of legends celebrating legal defiance in the name of some ‘natural standard:…….This mythology transformed all outlaws into Robin hoods, how ‘correct” socially unjust laws….This mythology betrayed a profound pessimism about the individuals access to the legal system.” ( Ray 346)

“And with such a vast amount of wickedness in the world, how could I beat my bright blade into a dull and functional plowshare? There was so much yet to do, so many playground bullies who needed to learn new rules to the game, Dexter’s rules—there were even cannibals abroad in my very own city. Could I really just sit on the couch and knit while they worked their horrible will on the Samantha Aldovars of the world?”(Linsay 178)

“We have come both a long way and not so far from the assassins serial killers, and madmen who made their mass presence visibly felt in the late 1960s and early 70s. They, like the bodies wasted on the screen, have proliferated at an increasingly faster and decreasingly surprising rate. They and the violence that accompanies them are now a common, omnipresent phenomenon of daily life….we are resigned to living with them in what has become an uncivil society.”(Sobchack 416)

“And the music rises and we take him away to where the dance begins, the lovely cheography of The End, with its sam sharp steps and familiar movements and its smells of fear amid the soft sounds of tape and terror and the knife is sharp and swift and certain tonight as it races to the well known rhythm of the slowly swelling music of the moon, that rises and grows into the final chorus of fulfillment until, joy,, joy, joy, is in the world”(Lindsay 185)

Its for a frosh eng class.

Hi! I was just wondering if someone could look at this essay I wrote? I have writers block and need to add more analysis. Also, I'd appreciate any feedback on the analysis I did have.

Whether on TV shows, books, news shows, or films, serial killers loom large in the public imagination. Both real and fictional serial killers are popular. They are a modern day monster that fascinates and scares people because most people can't even imagine killing without remorse, much less enjoying it. The fear of serial killers is that, at least to many, they can be the person they least suspect is a neighbor. They reflect the worst in humanity and yet people want to know more about them, and what makes them tick. One such fictional serial killer is Dexter Morgan, a blood splatter expert for the Miami Police department. He is a twisted kind of Robin Hood. According to the author, he saw his mother being sawed into pieces at a young age, and he then became a psychopath. The man who raised him, Harry Morgan, was a cop and taught Dexter to channel his impulses to only kill others who did wrong to society. The author who created Dexter Morgan, Jeff Lindsay, taps into society’s fascination with serial killers, but instead of telling Dexter’s story through his various victims, or the police officers trying to solve the murders of said victims, he uses Dexter’s point of view. Using the criminal’s point of view is nothing new, as it’s been done to TV shows such as the Sopranos, Law and Order Criminal Intent, and other shows. Robert B. Ray’s definition of an outlaw hero; thus appealing to audience sense of justice and desensitization to violence
Dexter Morgan is a secret outlaw hero who takes the law into his own hands. Ray B. Ray, in an essay, the Thematic Paradigm, he lists the characteristics of what he terms as an ‘outlaw hero’. One of those he points out has to do with taking extra legal actions to ameliorate injustices.

Essentially, there are times when a society is willing to tolerate the breaking of the laws, even embracing it. This is a result of the imperfections of the legal system: not everyone is caught, and many of those who are caught, are let go. Thus, the ‘profound pessimism’(Ray 346) mentioned by Ray. Most people, in theory, like to think that they are not vigilantes at heart, but do not lose sleep at night if, for example, someone who murdered a child, were to be found dead somehow because to many, justice, or the ‘natural standard’ (Ray 346) has been fulfilled. Dexter’s foster father no doubt saw a lot of injustices in his career as a cop, and got so fed up with them, that he decided to train Dexter to become a careful killer, who won’t get caught, rather than taking him to therapy, upon seeing the then boy’s psychopathic tendencies.

In the latest novel, Dexter takes a break from killing, after the birth of his daughter, but soon a case involving literal modern day cannibals makes him decide to get back into the game.



For him, part of his role in life is killing those who harm others. While he enjoys of the act of killing itself, he sees himself as someone to take care of the bad guys or ‘playground bullies’ as he calls them. Nowhere in the above passage does he mention the police, thus showing that he takes it upon himself to take care of fellow monsters. Plus, Cannibals, in this occasion are another monster , who rank lower in status than serial killers, in the eyes of the audience and Dexter himself. This ranking is probably the result of colonization, where the indigenous peoples were looked down upon thought of as cannibals despite the fact that this was not the case. This was a way of painting indigenous people as ‘the other’. Vestiges of this are still lingering in the back of people’s minds. Moreover, eating fellow human beings is a worse taboo than merely killing them. So, in this case, Dexter would be killing a monster worse than himself. The idea of modern day cannibals are also tool of the author to shock, disgust or scare the desensitized reader. The cannibal group consists of young people, and the headquarters is a club, thus painting the cannibals as every day people. While the Robin Hood of Legend stole to help others, Dexter secretly kills to help others, namely past and future victims of fellow predators. All of those he kills are those, whose acts haven’t been caught by police.

Dexter’s is for audiences, who are used to violence, and who want individuals who do wrong to be punished. Vivian Sobchack, writes on essay, titled “The Postmorbid Condition” to take about how society has become desensitized to violence, and violent people. She writes



Essentially what Sobchack is referring to is desensitization towards violence. There is so much of it around, that people no longer blink an eye. Between TV shows, movies, the news, and even novels. This is not very unlike Roman society, where it was considered popular entertainment to watch people fighting to the death, or being killed by lions. There’s a kind of bloodlust involved. Jeff Lindsay, plays on this in his description of Dexter killing one of the cannibals in the book.



Dexter, a psychopath, takes joy in the violence. The novel Dexter is Delicious, is just one of several books about the character, showing that audiences are not put off by this violence and death of people. In this description, Dexter even compares the act of killing to a dance, calling it “the lovely choreography of The End”(Lindsay 185). Interestingly, the author capitalizes the T and E for ‘the end’ even though it is not required by standard English grammar rules because he wants to convey that he was referring to death. Moreover, the struggle and suffering of the victim is played down to being ‘smells of fear amid the soft sounds of tape and terror”(Lindsay 185). Thus, the victim here is no longer human, and just a background sound, a type of, as Sobchack would say dummy “ with multiple surfaces devoid of subjectivity and gravity.”(Sobchack 417). Jeff Lindsay wants the audience to feel what Dexter feels ie joy and fulfillment. He knows that he already had an audience desensitized to violence and thus, as the saying goes ‘halfway there’.
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