engleski

The Evil That Men Do: Portrayals Of Psychopaths In Works Of Narrative Art

This paper turns to works of narrative art in order to see what great works of literary fiction, cinema and television reveal to us about the propensity of certain individuals – evil doers, monsters or psychopaths, depending on one’s semantic preferences and/or genre proclivities – to harm others. Explicitly or not, but works of narrative arts have always been interested in and inspired by the behavioral patterns classified as mental disorders, and by the patterns of interactions between individuals that result from these disorders. While the most famous psychopaths found in narrative art - the narrators of Poe’s The Black Cat or The Tell-Tale Heart, Patrick Bateman of American Psycho or Hannibal Lector of The Silence of the Lambs – have by now attained a significant cultural status, there are many other psychopaths, less famous but equally intriguing, that populate our fictional worlds. My aim in this paper is to look at these fictional portrayals and to see whether (i) they can tell us something about the distinctive nature of psychopathy and whether (ii) they hold any sway to our emotional reactions triggered by fictional characters, particularly for empathy

literature, narrative understanding, psychopathy

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