An Insight into the Stranger in Fred Vargas’s L’Homme à l’envers

Abstract

The aim of this work is to explore the construction of the character of Lawrence Donald Jonhstone in the detective novel L’Homme à l’envers, by French writer Fred Vargas. Firstly, we will analyze how this Canadian man –explicitly described with characteristics opposed to those of other inhabitants of the community taking him in– is presented as a divided self with two different cultural heritages. Secondly, we will observe his connection with the ani-mal world, which defines him as non-human, half man-half beast, and a stranger to society. As we will demon-strate, both these aspects predispose him to occupy the archetypal figure of the guilty in the system of characters featured in this novel.