Considering the Thomas Harris novels, I wonder how Lecter went from background in Red Dragon to protagonist in Hannibal.
It seems an almost Penrodesque case of the antagonist becoming the protagonist.
I remember upon reading of Lecter’s escape in Silence of the Lambs being pleased that Will Graham must be the protagonist of the next novel. In discussion in this forum, I realized that Will does catch serial killers, he figures out who did it. Capturing them is the work of folks like Clarise.
So how did Lecter go from the monster in RD who we thought would murder a child upon smelling Will’s aftershave (and indeed tells the tooth fairy his address) to the heroic figure carrying the wounded Clarise through the man eatting wild boar in Hannibal?
I close with the strange digression that the zoo here has a reproduction of the bronze boar in the last novel; children put pennies in a slot at the base for charity.
The character in Red Dragon/ Manhunter wasn’t fully developed. Lector comes of age in SotL, and it seems pretty clear that Harris wants nothing more to do with Lector after Hannibal. Although, I must admit that there was some interesting character background for Lector in Hannibal.
How would you react if you saw the teeth of your little sister in a pile of someones shit?
My guess is that Thomas Harris was sick and tired of Lecter, and had nothing interesting to do with him after “Silence of the Lambs,” but he’d gotten a lot of money to write a sequel and didn’t want to give it back.
So, he did what New Line studios did with Freddy Krueger: he ignored the previously established fact that his most prominent character was evil and turned that character into a campy joke, a wisecracking monster who kills one-dimensional, unsympathetic victims while making bad puns.
I think the problem was that Harris had to fully develop this character whom we had only seen behind bars for a few pages at a time in the other books.
Plus, Harris had to try and make Lecter live up to the expectations he set for him earlier. And I don’t think he really succeeds. Lecter works best when we’re afraid of what he can do. In “Hannibal” he doesn’t really DO anything that lives up to our imaginations. He writes cryptic letters to Clarice? He works at a museum? Boring! We liked it when we couldn’t explain Lecter. And then Barney had to go ruin it in “Hannibal” saying, “He eats the rude”*. Oh. Well.
*[sub]It was Barney who said that in the book, right? Because I know he says it in the movie…[/sub]
His victims before Hannibal included his captors in SotL, a tourist whose identity and money he stole after escaping, a nurse in the state psychiatric hospital (he didn’t kill her but he disfigured and maimed her), and the cellist for the Baltimore Philharmonic, so his killing wasn’t confined exclusively to the rude. I can’t remember- does the book explain how he got away with the attempted murder of Mason Verger?
By the end of Hannibal, Lecter is potrayed as not so much human as the next evolutionary step; he’s more on par with the vampires of Anne Rice. Jt’s almost hard to imagine him getting his hands bloody. I think the distancing of him was Harris’s attempt to remove the horror.
I think in SoTL, Lecter mentions how their sessions were going nowhere and how the guy was generally annoying. In the movie “Red Dragon”, it’s implied he’s killed because he’s a bad flautist.