Silence, Part 3, a shorter response

Question 3: The most influential and wide-ranging set of allusions and metaphors in the entire novel refers to change. Choose one instance from this week's reading and analyze how it works and what it has to do with this theme in the novel.

Walking deep through his extensive memories, Dr. Lecter recalls his last session with Raspail. In this session, Raspail goes into some detail about Jame Gumb and explains how Gumb came to crave change. After a turbulent childhood that including killing his grandparents at the age of twelve, Gumb never quite found himself. Raspail reports “he’s not anything, really, just a sort of total lack that he wants to fill, and so angry” (157). In a moment of utter devastation – having lost his job, his lover, and having just killed someone again – Gumb searches his previous employer’s mail trying to find something he could steal.

Though there was nothing of any monetary value in any of the packages Gumb tosses, he did find a large box from Malaysia full of dead butterflies. This final defeat was almost more than Gumb could handle and “he sat on the bed with his head in his hands, butterfly colors on his hands and face, and he was at the bottom, just as we’ve all been, and he was crying” (158). Of course, when one reaches bottom, the only thing left to do is change; either one climbs back up or falls into a despair so dark they are completely lost. Gumb’s answer came to him as he sat there with tears streaming down his newly colored face.

“He heard a little noise and it was a butterfly in the open suitcase. It was struggling out of a cocoon that had been thrown in with the butterflies” (158). The entire process of the butterfly crawling out of the cocoon is an age old metaphor for change. This is the final stage in the butterfly’s metamorphosis – it was transformed from an ugly, unwanted caterpillar into a beautiful butterfly that is free to fly as far as its wings can carry it. Gumb opened a window and released the butterfly and as it flew into the air, “he felt so light… and he knew what to do” (158).

It was not long after that Gumb took his first piece of flesh from a victim and wore it like clothing. Raspail reported to Dr. Lecter that when Gumb killed Klaus, he made an apron out of him and wore it to try and regain Raspail’s affection. Gumb believed that by wearing someone else’s skin, perhaps he could change into something or someone else. If he could escape his own skin by wearing someone else’s, he could transform just like the butterfly had.

This box of dead butterflies ends up being a Pandora’s Box for Gumb. Everything is let out, everything in the box is dead, and he is left feeling even more despair than before he opened it in the first place. In the end, when he is sure he has reached the bottom of this pit of anger and negative emotion, he sees the newly changed butterfly, and in it, he sees hope for himself.