50 pages • 1 hour read
Darkly Dreaming Dexter
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Symbols & Motifs
The Dark Passenger
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of graphic violence, blood, domestic violence, and child abuse.
Dexter’s Dark Passenger is the embodiment of Dexter’s darkness. It is the name he gives to his inner thirst for violence and his homicidal urges. As such, it is the novel’s primary symbol of unrepentant serial violence. In Dexter’s estimation, the Passenger is always with him as a passenger accompanying its driver. When he finds the urge to kill unsurmountable, he feels the Dark Passenger “taking the wheel” and knows that the rational part of his brain is no longer in control.
Although the Dark Passenger lacks humanity and a conscience, Dexter learns to harness the Dark Passenger’s impulses to right the world’s various wrongs. Harry helped him develop a code that dictates what kinds of victims he targets and establishes a rubric for prepared, orderly killing techniques. Harry was a police officer who once saw the world through a black-and-white framework in which killing was evil and police work was good. But as Harry watched killer after killer evade detection, he came to think differently about the nature of good and evil and the utility of vigilante justice. The Dark Passenger thus helps the author to explore Vigilante Justice and the Nature of Good and Evil. The Dark Passenger is evil embodied, and yet with Harry’s help, Dexter uses him to rid the world of other killers and serial predators. Through this depiction, the text interrogates traditional notions of good and evil and suggests that sometimes evil can resemble good, and good can resemble evil.
The Blood Slides
Dexter’s blood slides, each containing a single drop of his target’s blood, are another of the novel’s key symbols. They help the author explore The Importance of Behavioral and Moral Codes because they are an important part of the behavioral portion of the code Harry teaches Dexter. To kill only the deserving and to evade detection, Harry teaches Dexter to carefully study and select his victims, choosing only men whose serial violence, often toward children, makes them a clear danger to society. He teaches Dexter to keep himself safe from suspicion by carefully preparing for his kills and executing his victims with precision, leaving no evidence behind, and taking no trophies or souvenirs. He must also blend in with his peers, mimic human emotions, and appear normal.
For the most part, Dexter upholds this code to the letter. The slides, however, represent a slight rebellion that reveals the limits of Dexter’s ability to control his behavior and suggests the code is only as strong as Dexter’s belief in it. Although the slides are arguably “evidence,” Dexter’s desire to commemorate his kills is too strong to resist. Their neat, tidy appearance is a compromise, a clear effort to remain a “clean monster,” which is as close as Dexter can come to abiding by Harry’s code while still taking something from his kills. He keeps the slides in a small box hidden in his apartment. One of Dexter’s few moments of panic in the novel comes when he realizes he has forgotten to take a slide from the scene of his most recent crime. He cherishes these slides; collecting one after a kill is essential to completing the ritual, which illustrate that, no matter how normal he tries to seem or how hard he tries to follow Harry’s code, at his core, he is a killer who takes pleasure and satisfaction in the act.
Blood
In Darkly Dreaming Dexter, blood is a central motif that represents life, death, family, and Dexter’s dual identity. As a blood spatter analyst for Miami Metro, Dexter’s professional life revolves around blood, which he analyzes to help solve crimes. His other identity as a vigilante serial killer is also intimately connected to blood, as seen in his ritual of collecting blood slides from his targets, which symbolize his need for control and his desire to memorialize his kills.
Moreover, blood is depicted as something that binds Dexter to his past and his family. His first exposure to blood, witnessing his mother’s death and sitting in the bloody aftermath, as a traumatic event that shaped his psyche, birthing both his Dark Passenger and his obsession with blood. Dexter’s relationship with his adoptive father, Harry, also carries the weight of blood, as Harry’s code is meant to channel Dexter’s violent urges in a way that serves justice. Through this, blood becomes not just a symbol of death but also of family ties and moral guidance, complicating Dexter’s understanding of right and wrong.
Notably, the Tamiami Slasher’s crime scenes are notable for their lack of blood. When the slasher is revealed as Dexter’s biological brother, Brian, this establishes blood as a point of connection and contrast between the brothers. They are bound by blood through family and shared trauma, but they treat it differently in their kills: Brian removes all trace of it, while Dexter always preserves a single drop. Blood is both a marker of Dexter’s violent nature and a symbol of his deeper connections to those around him, a symbol of the tension between his dark instincts and desire for human connection.
Children and Childhood
Children and childhood are another of this novel’s important motifs. There are multiple children in the narrative, and Dexter often contemplates children and the nature of childhood, which allows the text explore The Impact of Childhood Trauma on Adult Behavior and examine illustrating the various ways that childhood trauma manifests in adults.
The first children who feature in the story are the victims of one of Dexter’s targets, the priest who has evaded capture with the complicity of the Catholic Church. Although all his victims are themselves killers, Dexter is especially dedicated to eliminating those who kill children. He lacks empathy and genuine concern for humanity in general, but he reasons that children are particularly innocent and those who prey on them are particularly heinous. Dexter cannot save the children the priest already killed, but he can prevent the priest from striking again, and he does so.
Dexter’s interest in children partly stems from his own tragic and traumatic past, though he doesn’t learn the full details of his backstory until the novel’s conclusion. However, even as the story begins, Dexter is sure that he was the victim of something terrible and his homicidal urges are rooted in that experience, and he hopes to prevent other children from becoming like him. He puts this theory into practice with Astor and Cody, Rita’s children, who bore witness to horrific domestic violence. Dexter does not want them to repeat the cycle of violence and become violent themselves, so he does his best to emulate Harry’s example and provide them with love, consistency, and support.
At the end of the novel, when Dexter discovers he and his brother were present at their mother’s murder, it becomes obvious that his penchant for violence stems from that event. Because Dexter grew up with Harry’s guidance, he manages to channel his violence toward good, while his brother, Brian, kills indiscriminately. This contrast suggests that it is possible to escape the cycle of violence. Dexter might kill, but he does so with a conscience, and he wants better for Astor and Cody, whom he wants to be normal, happy children without any attraction or inclination to violence.
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