Mike Geary, the worker in wood, proposed O'Neill's "The Iceman Cometh" as a literary instance of murder followed by surrender and he was right on target. As I knew he would be. In fact, since my own example (_The Little Sister_) had a slight flaw, Mike's is the only example in American literature so far.
So maybe my initial hunch was right. Unfortunately I've been reformulating the 'dependent' variable that I'm interested in, thus requiring a new search. My focus now is not on the 'crime' at all but solely on nature of the actor's next act. Take Julien Sorel. He tries to kill someone, then allows himself to be arrested, makes no effort to defend himself, try to escape or agree to a lighter sentence than death. I don't care to know what's going on his head so much as I want to know how this behavior is viewed by his fellow countrymen. How do _they_ explain his behavior? Do they approve?
But that's of course only one kind of 'next act'. Suicide is another. Successfully evading detection and arrest still another. Do France and the US favor different literary solutions? Here at home for instance crime was never allowed to pay until quite recently, when Woody Allen made "Crimes and Misdemeanors". René Clair on the other hand made at least 2 films in the 30's in which the cops lose. In Gide's _Les Caves du Vatican_ Lafcadio commits a murder, an 'acte gratuit', and suffers no consequences at all. The only American counterpart I can think of is Patricia Highsmith's Mr. Ripley. There are surely dozens of examples from both literatures that I've overlooked. Please keep the comments and postcards coming.
Norman Miller
