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RESEARCH PRODUCT

A “Voodoo Doll in Diapers”: Deconstructing the Cruel Child in Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003)

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This chapter examines the ways in which Lionel Shriver’s novel We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003) complicates mainstream representations of young high school shooters. The central argument is that Shriver offers her readers a critical and informed meta-perspective which conceives of childhood as a discursive construct. The chapter illustrates how constructivism arises as a highly ambivalent practice in the novel. One the one hand, it allows the novel to dissect and challenge the patterns according to which school shooters are commonly constructed in the media without, however, confirming any of them as Kevin’s “true” nature. On the other hand, the novel’s engagement with constructivism is by no means naive; it equally considers and articulates the ethical limits of applying it to a cruel child.