Hazy Truth

Another interesting aspect of this novel is how it presents “the truth.” On the one hand, Carr is like a muckraker exposing the issue of male prostitution. It’s very sad and makes me wonder if this really happened (Carr makes me think the story is based on true facts). At the same time, there is also the theme that newspapers don’t report the truth, which Carr presents as being wrong, since only certain papers will publish certain stories. This hinders the people from knowing the truth and further helps breed corruption within the government. For example The New York Times, the paper John works for, won’t cover the gruesome Santorelli murder; however, there might be one paper in the city/state of New York that might.

When Steffens finally publishes a story on it however, Roosevelt and Kreizler are angry because they don’t want the story exposed to the people—because it might cause an uprising in the immigrant community (since immigrant boys are being targeted) and because the murderer might figure out that the police are slowly piecing the clues together and linking the many murders (as they continue to occur; basically they’re right on his trail). By keeping information from the public, the government is still not being truthful to the people. This gives an academic element again because it suggests that during this time period, certain issues were not published for everybody to see and learn about. Instead the people were “kept in the dark.”

This academic element parallels another—Kreizler’s quest to find the truth about his patients and discover their mental state. He does this by analyzing patients and determining patients’ whether they’re insane or not based on years of research. He attempts to find motives for why this person (presumed to be a male, 6 foot 2 inches who is a customer of the boy prostitutes) would kill innocent boys. Kreizler believes that as a result of his childhood, the man is responding this way. He advances the point that people are ruled by what happened to them as a child.