frost
Jun 19th, 2007 by drummerboy
ruthless – Frost’s second murder appears ruthless to the average reader and citizen of America, and many other countries as well. Beating his master’s head in with a gardening hoe to the point where its contents were spilled out on the ground is brutal and gruesome. What makes it Frost ruthless is that he didn’t stop pounding after his victim cried for him to stop, saying that enough damage had been done and that the point was made. He had wronged him and was sorry for it, but Frost considered this confession insufficient and continued to waylay the man until death was undeniable.
vengeance – Vengeance is defined in this narrative as the exaction of just punishment for actions done to a person or to a person that is in some way connected with one’s self. In the narrative we learn that Frost was harmed in some way either to himself or to his mother by both of the father figures that he killed. His acting out against those actions taken against him is defined as vengeance. The word comes with skewed meaning for everyone who is involved. For some vengeance goes as far as tipping off the authorities to the offender, but for others like Frost vengeance is more personal and must be wrought with the victim’s own hands.
sympathy – Taking pity on someone who has been wronged, injured, or hurt in some way whether it be physical or mental. Frost showed sympathy for his victims while he was in jail. Many would claim that his beating his head against the wall in a claim to feel what his victims felt made him crazy and insane. I feel that this was an act of sympathy on the part of Frost. He knew that it was wrong to kill those men, but their actions against him and his mother proved too much for him to handle and he had to get his revenge. His actions turned out to go just a little bit too far in our standards of revenge and he was penalized for them. But his desire to know or at least relate to the pain that his victims suffered shows sympathy and conscience, which in my mind saves him from being insane.
Your reading of Frost’s seemly inexplicable action of repeatedly banging his head against the wall as an act of empathy is fascinating to me. Frost is so interesting because he fits so few of the models of the crime narrative we have up and until this point. He challenges many of the norms in terms of his reactions, his brutal crimes yet strict adherence to the principles of telling the truth and remaining faithful. He is an enigmatic character whose relationship to his victims seems even more complex. The point you raise about his idea of vengeance being skewed by the narrative is also interesting. Do we know what either of this figures did to him to force him to such a heinous act? We have some idea, but the story is much more concerned with the visualizing of the gruesome murders, rather than an examination of the context for each crime.