character analysis - ''silence of the lambs''

The psychological horror novel ‘’The silence of the Lambs’’, written by Thomas Harris left behind many questions after being read. In my attempt to explain some events that took place in the novel I wrote a character analysis, which I’ll be sharing today with you.

My first analysis revolves itself around one of the many discussions between Dr. Lecter and Starling, the discussion that I’m talking about here finds itself on page 193, in the novel in case you would like to revise it again. Trough one of Dr. Lecters monologues, he mentions that, and I quote his words, ‘’He’s not a transsexual, Clarice. He just thinks he is’’, referring to Buffalo Bill. His affirmation might be confusing as there’s no additional explanation to his conclusion.

My hypothesis on why he affirmed that, highlights the fact that Buffalo Bill just goes trough the illusion of wanting to change his gender. Transsexuals are individuals that intend to change their gender that was assigned to them at birth for another gender, this transition might or might not include surgery, depends on the subjects' preferences. According to this definition, Buffalo Bill can be viewed as a transgender but in his case there are a few details that show why he wouldn’t truly be one. He has the need to completely erase his personality/existence as much as possible. We’ll get to why he would want something like this later. The first step to understand the phenomena is to observe that in his case we are talking about psychological denial. What is psychological denial? Explained in its simple form, psychological denial takes place when the individual that went trough unpleasant unfortunate situations/past trauma builds a denial mechanism, in order to protect his emotional security from suffering further damage. In the case of Buffalo Bill, we are informed that he went trough abuse trough his childhood, which built his violent nature in the first place. His psychological denial, it’s one of the results from his past traumatic experience. He wants to completely deny his identity as a coping mechanism. His denial is used to refuse the reality. His identity, including his gender would remind him of who he was while he went to traumatic experiences. Blocking the view of his body, changing his name and pronouns would make him a new person and would block the memory of his past experiences. That led him to change his name by giving himself a totally new name but also using feminine pronouns when referring to himself.

In conclusion, he couldn’t handle the high level of anxiety when thinking about himself because he most probably saw his current self very strongly bonded to the abuse. My former sentence is motivated by the fact that he was obsessed with change, which can be observed in his macabre way of ‘’signing’’ his crime, by using moths which resembled change.

My second analysis revolves around the fact that he refused to speak to the victim in second person, but instead he used the third person for his last victim, and I quote an example ‘’It places the lotion in the basket.’’ In the most cases of abduction that led to crime, the killer ‘plays’ with its victim, initiating dialog in order to mentally exhaust the victim, etc. In our case, contrariwise the killer doesn’t initiate dialog with his victim and in addition, he speaks to the victim as if he wasn't directly implied. This situation shows that he might feel remorse because he can’t handle speaking directly to the victim and refuses to imply himself mentally. His sense of guilt indicates the he is most likely a sociopath, since psychopaths will show no guilt or remorse at all through their actions, while on the other hand sociopaths have a very thin layer of guilt blended with their emotions.

Beside the context, the novel, it's really challenging and it's a great read for those who enjoy suspense and mystery.

REFERENCES: ‘’The silence of the Lambs’’ written by Thomas Harris, 1988