Thanks guys!
It is a testament to the sad state of my existence that AVBookClub week is one of the highlights of my month, and I want to thank you for putting this together. It's really fun and I get to say lots of dumb things without getting criticized too harshly.

And I do think we know enough to speculate as to why he killed the Kansas girl. There are two brief sections about it, and both are about power. In the first, he says he buried her at the river bend, the place of power. In the second he says he was able to kill her with just one arm. Combined with everything else…

**is weird** not "is a weird" Gah.

Well, I think most of us are more horrified by the real bombings than Muldrow's murders, but that's not what we're discussing here and they're not the focus of the book. Like Muldrow, though, I'm sure we reasoned away these murders of civilians as necessary for our survival and like him I'm sure many people refuse to…

I think to argue that he's not a serial killer because he doesn't believe himself to be one is a weird and I wonder if any serial killers actually would describe themselves as such.

I think many serial killers would argue that murder is just a means to an end for them, but that doesn't mean they're not serial killers. Muldrow sure goes out of his way to put himself in situations where he'll get to kill people. I don't see how the Kansas girl, the samurai, the samurai's wife, or the Ainu…

The first time I read the "I buried her" line, I thought maybe it was a euphemism for sex. Thank god Dickey made it clear a few pages later.

"In general, a lot of critters think only about their survival without considering its impact on others." Right, but Muldrow's cursed with being human (and it's pretty clear that he does consider it a curse).

Survival, sure, but look at the cost of one man's survival in this book. Your'e thinking only about consequences for one person but what about the consequences for the world around him? Can you read this book without wondering if it wouldn't have been better for the world if Muldrow had died in the plane crash?

I was puzzled by that passage. Why is it in there? Just another absurdity of war? Or maybe to contrast Muldrow's strange train of thought during a stressful situation where we would expect him to panic?

It probabably doesn't work—I'm pretty sure there's a passage that says that Muldrow was born in the continental US and only moved to Alaska when his dad took him there. I suppose he could have met an eskimo in Virginia, or that his dad could simply have lied to him about his origin, but those are far fetched…

I'm with Farmer John on this one. There may have been some traumatic moments in Muldrow's life that resulted in the man that he is in this book, but they must have happened well before the war. Dickey doesn't give us many (if any) hints as to why Muldrow is the way he is, either because he doesn't think it's…

He's sublimating into what the natural world represents for him, and I think that's a world of freedom from his humanity (guilt, morality, emotions) where he can be all animalistic ego.

This movie didn't fare as well in the Metropolis awards, where they chose co-winners Up and Away We Go.

The ego
So Muldrow is or at least seeks to be a pure egoist, right? He's willing to kill any number of people in exchange for his own safety/desires/whims, utterly ignoring any consequences for other people that his murders might cause. He often seems to believe (at least figuratively) that the world was built for…

Donna, I immediately thought of Muldrow's, "Hey, maybe I shouldn't have killed that guy, but oh well" reaction at the end, too. It's not much, but it's the closest he comes in the entire book to admitting that his notions might not be perfect. He almost, almost admits that a life other than his own might have some…

I'm now convinced that the "purity" that Muldrow sees in animals is his belief that they feel no guilt or emotion about killing. For him they are living symbols of pure ego with no thought to the ramifications of their actions. I don't think he truly empathizes with them as much as he wants to have their power and…

Swan feathers!
Goat leather!
Bear paw wall ornaments!
Bone needles (real human!)!
Bread knife and sharpener kit!
Ass compasses!

Wow, that line about guilt seems to be the key one here. Nice catch.

Ha. I've never read Deliverance, but I've read about it and never heard anyone discuss the action/thriller merits. I assumed that those were amped up for the movie.