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    A Kiss Before Dying. Themes

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    Stella María Caramuti Picca
    The four main themes in the novel A Kiss Before Dying by Ira Levin are greed, murder, deception, and love and marriage. Greed motivates the character Bud Curlis to murder Dorothy and her sisters Ellen and Marion for their family wealth. Bud deceives everyone by pretending to care for the sisters while plotting to kill them. Love and marriage in the novel are not portrayed as romantic, but rather as ways to achieve selfish goals like money and status.

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    A Kiss Before Dying. Themes

    Uploaded by

    Stella María Caramuti Picca
    2K views2 pages
    The four main themes in the novel A Kiss Before Dying by Ira Levin are greed, murder, deception, and love and marriage. Greed motivates the character Bud Curlis to murder Dorothy and her sisters Ellen and Marion for their family wealth. Bud deceives everyone by pretending to care for the sisters while plotting to kill them. Love and marriage in the novel are not portrayed as romantic, but rather as ways to achieve selfish goals like money and status.

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    Literary Analysis

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    The four main themes in the novel A Kiss Before Dying by Ira Levin are greed, murder, deception, and love and marriage. Greed motivates the character Bud Curlis to murder Dorothy and her sisters Ellen and Marion for their family wealth. Bud deceives everyone by pretending to care for the sisters while plotting to kill them. Love and marriage in the novel are not portrayed as romantic, but rather as ways to achieve selfish goals like money and status.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    2K views2 pages

    A Kiss Before Dying. Themes

    Uploaded by

    Stella María Caramuti Picca
    The four main themes in the novel A Kiss Before Dying by Ira Levin are greed, murder, deception, and love and marriage. Greed motivates the character Bud Curlis to murder Dorothy and her sisters Ellen and Marion for their family wealth. Bud deceives everyone by pretending to care for the sisters while plotting to kill them. Love and marriage in the novel are not portrayed as romantic, but rather as ways to achieve selfish goals like money and status.

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    A KISS BEFORE DYING

    By Ira Levin

    THEMES

    Four main themes pervade in the novel A Kiss Before Dying by Ira Levin: Greed, Murder,
    Deception and Love and Marriage.

    GREED

    Greed is an excessive desire for more of something, especially money or power. In the
    novel A Kiss Before Dying greed is reflected by Bud Curlis who has always wanted to become
    extremely wealthy. When he meets Dorothy, his classmate at University, he decides to make
    her fall in with him because her father is very rich. But he kills her because she got pregnant and
    thinks her father would disinherit her. His greed is also shown when he also tries to marry Ellen,
    Dorothy´s sister, and kills her too because she finds out that Dorothy has not committed suicide
    but has been killed. He kills Dwight as well to conceal his murder.

    MURDER

    Murder is also a linking topic in the novel. Bud Corlis murders people to achieve his aim,
    become wealthy and conceal his slaughters. When he kills Dorothy, he tries it to make her death
    appear as suicide. When he kills Dwight and Ellen he tries to make the murders appear as the
    work of an unidentified person. In the three occasions he acts under an unknown or false
    identity. His greed makes him murder innocent people to achieve his aim. This theme is also
    connected to the theme of deception.

    DECEPTION

    Deception is present throughout the novel A Kiss Before Dying. Bud, pushed by his greed,
    deceives everybody to achieve his aim. He promotes the belief that he is a lovely trustworthy
    man whose feelings are true in order to marry the Kingship sisters, thus deceiving them. He
    deceives the three sisters, their father and even the Police. He pretends that Dorothy commits
    suicide and he pretends that an unknown killer murders Ellen and Dwight, but he really pushes
    Dorothy from the roof and he shoots Ellen and Dwight. His greed pushes him to conceal his
    feelings and actions, thus deceiving everybody, in order to reach his goal: to become rich.

    LOVE AND MARRIAGE

    In real life love and marriage are associated with true feelings and affection. The theme
    of love and marriage is recurrent in the novel but it is neither associated with feelings or
    emotions. Bud´s and the three sisters´ parents’ marriages have been a failure, thus making their
    offspring seek for love under false ideals. Dorothy wants to get married because she wants to
    have a family, Marion wants to get married because she loves Bud and wants him to love her,
    whereas Bud wants to get married because he avidly loves money. Thus, love is not portrayed
    as romantic love but as pragmatic love; and marriage solely serves the purpose of achieving
    objectives, not affection.

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