Tenderness: Response

Mathilde Jochum

802

In the novel Tenderness by Robert Cormier, Eric Poole is a serial killer who sexually abuses his victims- after they've been killed. Lorelei Cranston, the secondary character, stumbles upon Eric at the railroad tracks when she is ten years old and gets an obsession to kiss him when she sees him in a newspaper, years later. He has killed approximately five people at that point, with one person after his release from juvenile detention center.The best way to deal with this is to dismiss him as horrible and not force oneself to think about it further. This is the cop out that young adult literature always makes sure to provide for those without a strong stomach. However, this is not a reason why he should be dismissed as evil without being scrutinized further. This is really the lesson and key point of the essay.

Eric is an interesting (if evil) person in many ways. Dismissing his thinking as "just wrong" stops one from contemplating the cause of the situation in the first place. He apparently started killing cats in the neighborhood because he says he found it irresistible not to "push too hard, caress a little bit too hard", and that's where it started. He had been taught to be gentle with animals, but his personality was taking that too far. He started to equate "gentle," "tender," and "animal assault" in his mind. So if one was going to point fingers and call Eric “messed up”, one would be right. However, one would also miss out on the thoughts behind his actions, never really getting to understand what the flaw in him was.

After a while, he becomes more violent, and he really wants to " share tenderness" with someone, not something. The fact that the book is called Tenderness, not Rape, Assault, or The Victim is because of the choice the author made as far as rhetoric goes: he wanted to use the euphemism tenderness for the above words because he wanted to make it clear that the main character really didn't see the other side of the situation. Therefore, he started to kill people. He didn't have the social skills to know how to get someone to have sex with him other than forcing them to or killing them. Thirteen-year-old Lori is trying to find out if he is dangerous to her, and reaches that goal, before she is killed by a drowning nobody committed.  Eric is put into prison again because people think he killed Lori. This is the first time he cries.  

When he was in prison for the first time, though, I don't wonder that he was happy to feel isolated. He didn't want people around because he had never really had a chance to learn many social skills, and since he  can't think about things from other peoples’ perspective to the point where he had never cried before, he probably found it hard to care about anything his inmates had to say to him. He, for instance, didn't make any friends there in the three years he was in prison, never used the same space if it could be avoided, and was not allowed to play team sports. Also, he didn't really understand why it was that he couldn't get anyone to like him, which is probably another reason he felt he needed to kill things before having sex with them, so that he wouldn't have to put up with drastic measures. "He hated drastic measures."

That is why although he did many wrong things, Eric had a very eye opening thought process that shouldn't be dismissed as wrong without having been examined. It could be that the book Tenderness, by Robert Cormier, is banned is because it tells the story from Eric's perspective, along with the narrative of an unsuspecting girl named Lorelei, nicknamed Lori. She seems  to some degree justify his behavior, which is a weird but important experience for me as I have never been put into a position in which I am asked to empathize with the antagonist of a story. Her innocence is very important because she honestly wants to be around him, and when she is drowned after having him try to save her twice, and the main character cries for the first time in his life, that is a really big implication that even while Eric himself has grown so self loathing, he calls himself a monster, “even monsters cry.” The thought behind the book is so deep that Ihave taken a very strong position on whether or not this book should be banned.

I do not agree with this book being banned. I understand the reason for it being banned, but in his case, the thought provoking plot is worth the disturbing subject. The exposure to the book is engaging because it opens the reader's mind. In fact, this lack of shelter is made to make you think about Eric’s thought process and how his environment affected it. It also gives you a painfully innocent perspective on the same things in a different way through Lori. You are forced to empathize with the mass murderer. That in itself is engaging because you only see this seldom. There are many things that are interesting about Eric's thinking. The only thing that is unclear even after scrutiny is this: why is it that Eric still doesn't feel bad about Alicia Hunt, his mother, his stepfather, Betty Ann Tersa, and others, and why he can't see the other side of the situation in which he's placing his victims.