The Bastard - Erskine Caldwell (1929) - What was the writer's purpose with the expression of violence in this novel?

Extract

[...] We need to observe that this assumption is in line with the perfect innocence of his character. Indeed, every time, he kills, it is not on pure and deliberate willing to create fear and desolation but he only kills « when he feels like it » as if it was an entire part of his human nature. And here, the portraying attempt of the character who merely looks like a simple beast. He seems indeed to be totally deprived of conscious and thinking about what he does, about what he feels exactly as a « savage ». [...]

[...] Indeed, we need to observe that social poor background of the main character is a total part and in line with the first origins of this kind of literacy. This way and like many other crime novels of the twenties, the violent content is not random but it creates purposedly an echo to the one of the battlefields of the American civil war. The marks of the original Pulp gender are present everywhere. We may here quote In our Time of Ernest Hemingway published in 1925, which is known for its specific spare language. [...]

[...] All the misery of the boy's background situation leads him into turning in a refractory kid then adult. As a consequence, if there is no deep sense of psychology in it, we need to observe that there is a clear connection between Gene's childhood sufferings and his deeds. Simplicity of the concrete places and actions is to label those simple people. Violence appears as a vital and necessary condition of these human beings. Like in Hamett's horror pulp fictions, like The Maltese Falcon, violence has no limit, is not detached from the narration, it is part of the narration itself and it leads to a feeling of absurd and deep randomness in people's moves, actions and destiny. [...]

[...] It unveils the fate of poor isolated rural and southern people who work hard in the cotton fields, live in the now, drink and follow their merry callings. They thus simply rush into misery and depravation without even being aware of it. The contrast between this innocence and the level of horror in their attitudes is all the more striking. This is also a key question of social-class limitation because there is simply no escape into Gene Morgan's destiny. That crime novel, though fictional, contains the seeds of protest against a certain abandoned America to the benefit of the growing American cities. [...]

[...] The Bastard - Erskine Caldwell (1929) - What was the writer's purpose with the expression of violence in this novel? « Where there is no human connection there is no compassion. The isolated turn cruel in the forms of domestic and civil violence » here is a brief definition from the writer Susan Vreeland which perfectly matches the title character of Erskine Caldwell's crime novel The Bastard. Published in 1929, the story of Gene Morgan is the first book of Caldwell which, with its unique style and way to seize and describe reality, will embody the American crime novel of the twentieth century. [...]