Getting on top through mass murder: Narrative, metaphor, and violence

Abstract

This paper makes a case for narrative criminology by describing the storied nature of mass murder by Jim David Adkisson in Knoxville, Tennessee, USA. Drawing on interviews with and writings by David, I suggest that his narrated identity was central to his violence. The ways in which he conjured himself, his personal and political situation, and despised others, animated his felt compulsion to do harm. In David’s story he simultaneously asserted (1) the license to harm and thus triumph over a depersonalized enemy and (2) harm’s inevitability. A narrative approach can explain the particulars of crime including its particular seductions.