Learning from the Masters: Lawrence Block's Use of Metaphor as a Narrative Device

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

According to his website, Lawrence Block started his writing career writing “midcentury erotica,” but is better known for his Matthew Scudder novel series and short stories. A Grand Master of Mystery Writers of America (MWA) and a former president of MWA, he has written other series of novels, some under various pen names, several non-fiction books; has contributed to several screenplays; has seen a number of his novels adapted to film; and maintains an occasional blog.

In his short story “Catch and Release” (Stories: All New Tales, edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio), Block's metaphor, comparing fishing to killing, unifies the story's action, allowing the author, at the same time, to characterize his nameless first-person protagonist as a philosophical, if psychotic, serial killer.

The narrative's opening paragraph lays out the protagonist's modus operandi. A fisherman, he subscribes to the practice identified by the catchphrase “catch and release”:

When you spent enough time fishing, you got so you knew the waters. You had certain spots that had worked for you over the years, and you went to them at certain times of the day in certain seasons of the year. You chose the tackle appropriate to the circumstances, picked the right bait or lure, and tried your luck.

If they weren't biting, you moved on. Picked another spot (168).

Throughout the rest of the story, the fisherman employs this strategy. In terms of Block's metaphor, the fisherman (protagonist) is the serial killer; the “sport” of fishing is the killing; and the fish are the vulnerable young women for whom he fishes. The metaphor is extended by the narrator's exposition and dialogue and by Block's descriptions.

 

For example, the protagonist entertains violent fantasies after he catches (gives a ride) to a female hitchhiker whom he releases (lets her depart from his vehicle alive and well):

. . . he gave himself over to the fantasy she inspired. A lonely road. A piece of tape across her mouth. A struggle ending with her arms broken.

 

Stripping her. Piercing each of her openings in turn. Giving her physical pain to keep her terror company.

And finishing her with a knife. No, with his hands, strangling her. No, better yet, with his forearm across her throat, and his weight pushing down, throttling her (172).

Like the fisherman in the story's opening paragraph, the narrator also moves from location to location, visiting “certain spots that worked . . . over the years.” he cruises the interstate, selecting his prey as he seeks to catch “a girl all by herself” (178). Like “the true fisherman,” he is content to “fish all night and catch nothing” while he reminisces about previous fish he's landed (179).

His identification with the ideal fisherman extends to his description of a woman he sees in a roadhouse, as he describes “her full-lipped mouth” and explains how he “closed the distance between them,” as if he were reeling in a fish (173).

Alternating between talk of fishing and his stalking of young women keeps the story's metaphor alive. For example, in recalling a previous murder victim, he compares her murder to the gaffing, or impaling or clubbing, of a fish:

. . . He'd pulled up behind her just as she was about to put her groceries into the trunk of her car, and hopped out and offered his help. She smiled, and was about to thank him, but she never had the chance. He had a flashlight in one hand . . . and he took her by the shoulder ans swung hr around and hit her hard on the back of the head. He caught her as she fell, eased her down gently (178).

Concerning the gaffing of a fish, the narrator explains,

. . . Most people, they think of fishing and they somehow manage not to think about killing. They seem to think the fish comes out of the water, gulps for air a couple of times, and then obligingly gives up the ghost. Maybe he flops around a little at first, but that's all there is to it. But, see, it;s not like that. A fish can live longer out of water than you'd think. What you have to do, you gaff it. Hit it in the head with a club. It's quick and easy, but you can't get around the fact that you're killing it (179).

Although the woman he clubs in the head with his flashlight does not die from the blow (she's rendered unconscious, instead), he later kills her, after terrorizing and raping her. In fact, his telling her about the gaffing of the fish is part of the way he terrorizes her, before he mentions “the other unpleasant chores” that result from the killing of a fish, “the gutting, the scaling, the disposal of offal” (179). He stops talking only so that she can reflect upon the terrible things he's told her, “letting her figure out what to make of it” (179).

As the protagonist points out, for him, “fishing is not just a metaphor” (174). he is a fisherman; fishing is part of his life and the means of his livelihood (he sells fishing lures through a mail-order service) ((171-172).

Fishing is also something akin to a religion for him, a source of moral precepts and guidance for living. Instead of the Bible, he reads (and rereads) Izaak Walton's The Compleat Angler and is familiar with Stephen Leacock's comment that “angling was the name given to fishing by people who couldn't fish” (177). Again and again, he repeats, “I am a fisherman.”

The act of fishing (capturing and killing young women) defines him: he is one who captures and kills, a serial killer. Even after he decides to “catch and release” women, he continues, occasionally, to kill his captives rather than releasing them. He remains, at the end of the story, what he was at the beginning of the tale: a fisherman, which is to say, a serial killer.

In the murder of a woman he encounters at a supermarket, the narrator describes himself as he appears to see himself (although his description, the reader sees, is not entirely accurate): he tells her that he is a “catch-and-release fisherman,” who enjoys fishing: “It does something for me that nothing else has ever done. Call it a sport or a pastime, as you prefer, but it's what I do and what I've always done” (178).

A narcissist who believes that women are no better than fish and can be used to satisfy his need to dominate, control, and decide their fate, as if killing is as much a “sport”—and as much a justified, morally correct “pastime”—as fishing, he captures and kills them with as much abandon as “most people” who “think of fishing” without associating it with “killing.”

In fact, the narrator derives his moral principles from the sport, an action that in itself suggests his madness:

. . . He had hooked and landed three trout. Each had put up a good fight, and as he released them he might have observed that they'd earned their freedom, that each deserved another chance at life.

But what did that mean, really? Could a fish be said to earn or deserve anything? Could anyone? And did a desperate effort to remain alive somehow entitle one to live?

Consider the humble flounder. He was a saltwater fish, a bottom fish, and when you hooked him he rarely did much more than flop around a little while you reeled him in. Dis this make him the trout's moral inferior? Did he have less right to live because of his genetically prescribed behavior? (175)

In his reflections, the protagonist moves from a fish to “anyone,” including, it seems, human beings or, more specifically, the young women for whom he routinely fishes. In conversing with the first young woman, the hitchhiker, whom the reader observes him to hook, or pick up, he tells her, “When [he releases them, and] they swim away . . . I get the sense that they're glad to be alive. But I may just be trying to put myself in their position. I can't really know what it's like for them” (170). He also wonders whether “they learn anything from the experience” of having been caught and struggles to free themselves and save their lives: “Are they warier the next time around?” When she replies, “I guess they're just fish,” he agrees: “I guess they are” (170).

These two passages, juxtaposed to one another, show that the narrator believes that the same moral principles, if any, that apply to fish also apply to his human victims. When it comes to morality, one precept fits all, regardless of species. If fish are undeserving of mercy, if they are undeserving of life, despite their valor, so, also, are young women. At least, that is true as far as anyone can know, because, to assume otherwise, requires a projection of one's own subjectivity upon creatures of the natural world. Whether fish or woman, the narrator says “I can't really know what it's like for them.” His inability to empathize aids his dehumanization of women.

Although the narrator may be right in asserting that we must presume that each of us must assume that others, like ourselves, are self-conscious entities capable of thought and emotion and belief and other subjective powers and processes and that we can, therefore, to some extent, at least “know what it's like for them,” he commits the fallacy of moral equivalency when he equates the value of a fish with that of a woman. A fish and a human being are not essentially the same, and there is no reason to value them equally. The comparison of them as equals is false and shows that the protagonist's thinking is deranged.

What type of “fish” captures the protagonist's attention, readers wonder (because the protagonist himself suggests this very question. While shopping at a grocery store, “he hadn't been looking for her,” or anyone else, but “then he looked up and there she was” (177). Although she is beautiful, he admits, “it wasn't her beauty he found himself responding to” (177). What was it, then, the reader wonders, that caught his eye?

Like the other young women whom he does not “catch and release,” she is killed by him. Perhaps, then, by recalling the other women he has killed already, we can glean the source of his attraction to this woman. One woman he recalls killing had passed out from drinking too many gandy dancers. Unable to terrorize her by suggesting his intentions to her before committing the outrages against her, “he let himself imagine that she was dead, and took her that way,” before breaking her neck (174). What seems to have excited him was her helplessness.

However, in considering the “many” women he's killed, the narrator states that “little of what he did ran to pattern” (175). In fact, he admits, “if anything, he'd deliberately sought variety, not for precautionary reasons but because it was indeed the spice of life—or death, if you prefer” (175-176).

Unlike many other serial killers, he does not take “trophies” and does not keep “souvenirs.” Moreover, he confuses memories of real victims with memories of imaginary victims about whom he has fantasized (176).

The woman he encounters in the grocery store is “beautiful, not young-pretty like the hitchhiker” he catches and releases, “or slutty-available like Marni the barfly,” whom he also catches and releases, “but genuinely beautiful,” so beautiful that 'she could have been an actress or a model” (177). However, he says, it is not to her beauty that he responded, and “it scarcely mattered what she wore” (177). After he hits her in the back of the head, knocking her unconscious, the woman is as helpless as the woman who'd drunk too many gandy dancers.

His victims' helplessness seems to be one of the elements that he finds attractive in his victims, which may be the reason he selected the drunken woman, but the grocery shopper was not helpless before he'd struck her. Like the gandy dancers victim, the protagonist snaps the grocery shopper's neck, after arranging “her on the ground on her back” and smashing “both her kneecaps,” but laving “tape on her wrists and across her mouth” (179). In other words, he renders her even more helpless, denying her the ability to run or scream or fight. Helplessness certainly seems one of the elements that the protagonist finds attractive, whether it is present when he kidnaps a victim or whether he himself causes her helplessness after the fact.

Toward the end of the story, the narrator recalls “the first time he'd departed from the catch-and-release pattern,” which was “less impulsive” and more planned. She was “the right girl,” and, like the other victims, had “turned up.” Thus, she was a target of convenience, as were most of his other victims. She was also physically attractive, “young, blond, a cheerleader type, with a turned-up nose and a beauty mark on one cheek” (180). 
The narrator does not tell what he did to this girl; he mentions only that “he'd thought long and hard about it.” However, his recollections of other victims' fates suggests that he also rendered her unconscious and, therefore, helpless, and dispatched her after terrorizing and raping her. Despite his claims to the contrary, there does seem to be a method to his madness, after all.

The protagonist finds justification for his killings in viewing himself as a fisherman and the women he kills as being prey who are of no more value than fish. However, he also cites the Bible or alludes to it on several occasions, leaving readers to wonder what might Block's purpose be in having his protagonist make such references.

The first reference to the Bible is actually a quotation of Luke 5:5: We fished all night and caught nothing. The Gospel verse is quoted out of context. The fisherman Simon (later, the apostle Peter), a fisherman, is suggesting to Jesus that it is pointless to continue to fish, as Jesus has instructed Simon and the rest of the ship's crew. However, when Simon obeys the command, Jesus performs a miracle, and the net is so full of fish that it breaks. When, with the assistance of the crew of a second ship, the fish are loaded aboard both ships, they are so heavy that they sink. Despite Simon's petition to Jesus to leave him, because Simon is a “sinful man,” Jesus tells the fisherman to follow him and that Jesus will make Simon “a fisher of men.”

Jesus calls his disciple to a very different sort of fishing expedition than that to which the protagonist of Block's story devotes himself. Instead of saving the souls of the unworthy, Block's narrator seeks to destroy the bodies and minds of his captives and to take their lives. The narrator of “Catch and Release,” as readers will learn, is too narcissistic, too sadistic, and too psychotic to understand the significance of the Bible verse he quotes or, perhaps, knowing the meaning of the scripture, perverts it by citing it in reference to his own monstrous deeds.

The protagonist seems to see himself and his victim, the grocery shopper he has bound and maimed, n the roles of Adam and Eve, describing them as “Adam and Eve in the garden . . . . Naked and unashamed” (180). Of course, Adam and Eve were only “naked and unashamed” before they disobeyed God, whereupon their innocence vanished, and, “the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked” (Gen 3:7). They then “sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons,” aware and, it seems, repentant of their sin.

Once again, the narrator's reference to scripture is either intentionally ironic and blasphemous or misapplied. It seems, given his character, as it is revealed throughout the story, that the protagonist intends to mock Christian morality, which, after all, does not only conflict with his own, but censors it. In Christianity, the creature is not the equal of the Creator any more than the beast is the equal of the human. Women are not fish, and the fisherman is not a god.

Block leaves the reality of the protagonist's monstrosity before the reader; at the end of the story, the narrator continues to believe that he is doing nothing wrong, even when he kills, rather than releases, his victims. It is his position of moral equivalency that allows him to indulge his delusion that women, like fish, are expendable commodities in the satisfaction of his sadistic “sport” or (the metaphor changes) his appetite for flesh:

He was still a catch-and-release fisherman. He probably always would be. But, for God's sake, that didn't make him a vegetarian, did it?

Hell, no. A man still had to have a square meal now and then (180).