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“The face did not seem heavily beaten or bruised—the paint and powder were still intact—but where once there had been eyes there were now only bloody, cavernous sockets. A puzzling piece of flesh protruded from the mouth. A wide gash stretched across the throat, though there was little near the opening. Large cuts crisscrossed the abdomen, revealing the mass of the inner organs. The right hand had been chopped neatly off. At the groin there was another gaping wound, one that explained the mouth—the genitals had been cut away and stuffed between the jaws. The buttocks, too, had been shorn off, in what appeared large…one could only call them carving strokes.” (Carr 16) These words are the description of a murder scene seen through John Moore’s (the narrator) eyes. He describes in detail how the almost naked boy was brutally murdered. That little thirteen year old boy who was once called Giorgio, but since he started prostituting himself, his new name became Gloria. This description of the murder scene if one of the moments that shocked me the most in reading “The Alienist” by Caleb Carr. However Flynn then goes on to describe the boy as an “It”, which such an act could only be described as cold and atrocious. Mark Seltzer says that the popuarity of these book comes from the author amazing research skills in captivating what that time period was like (1890’s). (Seltzer 5) I agree with Seltzer, Carr’s detail in this novel is amazing in illustrating what that time was like. I believe this makes the book more real in the sense that I can almost feel as sick as John Moore felt after seeing the crime scene.
References:
Carr, C. (1994).The Alienist. USA: Random House.
Seltzer, M. (Spring, 1997). Wound Culture: Trauma in the Pathological Public Sphere. Retrieved February 25, 2010 from http://www.jstor.org/stable/778805?seq=3.
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