Love, Crimes and Death in Peter Swanson's All the Beautiful Lies

The exploration of All the Beautiful Lies enables us to discover that in this narrative, Peter Swanson portrays love mainly through Edith’s relationship with Jake whose sexual urge derives from the initiation he receives in his teenage from an old woman called Emma Codd or Mrs. Codd. After killing his best friend Bill Ackerson in order to win the heart of the latter’s widow, he becomes upset minded and starts killing all those who, he thinks, have suspicions on him for fear of being jailed by the police whose investigations on all the mourning events in the author’s text remain a failure. It is only after confessing his crimes to Alice that his fellows are conscious of his culpability about the death of characters like Edith and Bill Ackerson, to quote only two. This is to say that if some characters are killed by Jake because of his jealousy, others, however, are victims of his fear to be jailed by the police. Such an account urges us to classify the author into the category of committed novelists, for he moralizes the reader by denouncing inhuman behaviors through fictitious characters.