Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter von Tom Franklin. Königs Erläuterungen Spezial.. Tom Franklin
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… Silas had a stream.” (306.1–2)
As the two characters who flank Larry, Silas and Wallace are also related in a contrasting symmetry. Both are Larry’s friends. One white, one black, one a half-brother, the other a strange kind of symbolic shadow brother, Wallace and Silas embody the themes and ideas of the novel in their oppositional symmetry.
| SILAS | WALLACE |
| Black | White |
| Gregarious and popular | Creepy and disliked |
| Single mother, father unknown | Single mother, father unknown |
| Destroys Larry’s life by concealing the truth about the night Cindy Walker disappeared. | Destroys Larry’s life by framing him for the murder of Tina Rutherford and shooting him. |
| Returns often to Larry’s home after the shooting – to investigate and to keep an eye on the place | Keeps returning to Larry’s home after having shot him (see 289.5–16) |
The two missing girls, Cindy and Tina, also embody certain themes and ideas within the novel.
| CINDY WALKER | TINA RUTHERFORD |
| Disappears, presumed murdered. | Disappears, presumed murdered. |
| Body never found – presumed murdered, but the killer is never officially identified. | Body discovered and murderer identified and killed. |
| Poor, considered “white trash”. Wants to leave school with Silas. | Privileged daughter of the region’s most prominent and wealthy family. Attends university. |
| Fully characterised in the novel. We meet her, see her interact with different characters and hear her speak. As a character, Cindy is as real to the reader as Silas or Larry. | Nothing but a name and a corpse. We never meet Tina nor ever hear her voice. She is missing and presumed dead from the beginning. Despite being the central focus of the crime thriller-plot of the novel (see the opening sentence) Tina is never “real” as a character. |
Two central characters
Larry and Silas are the central characters of the novel. They both tell the story from their own perspective, narrating the past as well as the present. While Larry is the central figure in the novel, Silas is the more active agent: He investigates the crimes, he becomes increasingly drawn into Larry’s world, and, as the plot unfolds, we learn that he is also deeply involved in the issue of how Larry became what and who he is in the present. What also emerges is that these two central characters are in fact brothers.
The majority of the present day level of the novel is told from Silas’ perspective, not least because Larry spends most of the period in question – roughly two weeks from the shooting to the end of the novel – in a coma. In contrast, Chapters 5 and 7, describing the friendship between the boys and the fight over the gun (5) and the events surrounding the disappearance of Cindy Walker (7) are told from Larrys perspective. This is significant because it reinforces the impression we have of Larry as someone who is a prisoner of the past, someone who has been unable to break away from those events and who has been defined by them. Silas is a more active agent in the present day: He investigates, he interacts with people, he moves around. Larry is literally frozen in time – in a coma – for most of the present day narrative of the novel.
Suspense and foreshadowing
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