We Need To Talk About Kevin Essay

Within Lionel Shriver's epistolary novel "We Need To Talk About Kevin," the narrator Eva attempts to analyze the events leading up to "Thursday" -- the day her son Kevin committed a mass shooting. In doing so, Shriver evaluates the concept of the school shooter. In popular media, the persona of the school shooter is culminated though a series of broad, mutual concerns about adolescent life in contemporary America. However, conversely, in "We Need to Talk About Kevin," Kevin is shown to attempt to build the persona individually. Essentially, while the shooting is situated within a larger cultural discourse, he does so on what he believes to be his own terms. This sort of persona construction can be better analyzed through Slavoj Žižek's theory of the mask, …show more content…
concealed in everyday social interactions. Žižek, therefore, states that the mask's function is not to be outwardly "orn," but instead to be "kept hidden." In the case of Kevin Khatchadourian, the mask of the school shooter is a sort of hypermasculine visage, illustrating violence and emotional detachment. Consequently, in "We Need to Talk About Kevin," the mask is fragmented between the caricaturized concept of masculine, adolescent "coolness" and Kevin's individual conflicts. Shriver, in this context, depicts this persona as a way in which Kevin is able to externalize his personal trauma -- making the shooting itself a failed act of self-definition. Shriver uses Eva's exploration of the past in conjunction with relevant symbolism to deconstruct the mask further. In deconstructing the development of the "mask" of hypermasculinity, Shriver shows that while Kevin wanted to believe he was exteriorizing an "authentic" identity through violence, the mask is, in actuality, stagnant and