Mapping the Mind of the Murderer: Power, violence and art in Bram Stoker's Dracula, Patrick Süskind's Perfume: The Story of a Murderer and Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho

The present thesis explores the workings of the criminal minds from different literary texts, which share a similar motif; it studies the ways the vampire/vampire-like murderers paradoxically create while destroying; finally, it examines how they get integrated in or rejected by the society and manage to affect their given environments, as well as get affected by them. It introduces an in-depth analysis of the subjects by focusing on three novels from different backgrounds. The archetypical vampire Dracula, created by Bram Stoker is the first focus in each chapter, and is continued by Patrick Süskind's Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, and Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho. In the first chapter, the aesthetic values of the murderous acts are discussed in the three books with the theoretical framework of Thomas De Quincey and his essays on murder. The fact that these criminals are also artists, and they create by destroying is highlighted. The second chapter of the thesis questions the meaning behind the criminals' art and the reasons for their creative acts. It gradually maps the minds of the murderers by interpreting the texts with the major help from Sigmund Freud's concept of congenital disadvantage. The last chapter discusses the main characters as pale criminals, a Nietzschean term used for the analysis of the society along with the criminals, the artist-murderers.