"You're Screwing Yourself": Jim Thompson's Unlikely Levinasian Prophecy
This essay employs the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas in an analysis of Jim Thompson's critically neglected 1953 crime novel, Savage Night. Savage Night is one of four first-person crime novels that Thompson produced in the early 1950s that conclude with the death of the narrator as told in the voi...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Dep.
2021
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| In: |
Religion & literature
Year: 2021, Volume: 53, Issue: 2, Pages: 113-135 |
| Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains: | B
Thompson, Jim 1906-1977, Savage Night
/ Lévinas, Emmanuel 1906-1995
/ Mortality
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| IxTheo Classification: | CD Christianity and Culture KAJ Church history 1914-; recent history NCA Ethics VA Philosophy |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | This essay employs the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas in an analysis of Jim Thompson's critically neglected 1953 crime novel, Savage Night. Savage Night is one of four first-person crime novels that Thompson produced in the early 1950s that conclude with the death of the narrator as told in the voice of the narrator. In each of these novels, the violent narrator concludes his story by making a surprising sacrificial gesture that transforms his nihilistic, ego-driven life into a confessional cautionary tale as ethical gift to the reader. Savage Night is the most allegorically expressive of these novels in its obsession with the inevitable mortality of the individual caught in the cycle of nature's generational predation. Levinas's philosophical meditation on death as the inevitable murder of the individual describes well the existential trap of mortality with which Savage Night is allegorically obsessed. Likewise apt for Thompson's novel is Levinas's contention that the substitutional sacrifice of the individual for the Other is the only possible meaningful response to death's absurdist ending. Savage Night's irrational conclusion, in which the narrator describes his own death and simultaneously begins his cautionary-tale confession to the reader, corresponds with Levinas's concept of man as an irrational animal whose distinguishing human trait is the unreasonable gift of the individual in meaningful substitution for the Other. Savage Night is transformed by its surprising and allegorically resonant ending from an escapist and implicitly nihilistic genre thriller into an ethical indictment of injustice in prophetic testimony to the transcendent Good. |
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| ISSN: | 2328-6911 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Religion & literature
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1353/rel.2021.0005 |