Analyzing

In week 3, we were asked to listen to a podcast on The Moonstone, pick a literary convention (Literary conventions are defining features of particular literary genres, such as novel, short story, ballad, sonnet, and play.) , and then show how that convention related to one of the novels that we had read so far. When I read the description for this part of the final project, I immediately thought of that week. I went back and read through that week's forum and decided to relate those conventions to Skin.

The very first convention mentioned in our discussion was the narrator or the main character reconstructing the crime (Ginny). In Skin one of the main character, Wendy, puts together what happened in her head and then repeats it to Colt. In my mind, this is similar to reconstructing the crime scene.

Another convention mentioned in this forum was red herrings (Cassy). Skin is full of countless red herrings. It seemed that every couple of pages there was a new person who could possibly be Red. Dekker had me going down many different goat trails before he finally said who the killer really was.

In this forum, Jesse mentioned to "inside job" as another convention. I had never really though of this as a convention, or tool, but it definitely is. Skin is a great example of this convention; unfortunately, I can't go into detail on this one. I don't want to spoil the story for you!

The inclusion of a group of suspects is another convention that was mentioned during this discussion (Tyler). This is a major convention in Skin. The entire story, the main suspects are people in the group, not an outside person. I think that stories that use this convention are sometimes more interesting than others because you get to know the people, you aren't just randomly introduced to them.