“In my own correspondence with Kennard he suggested that the poem’s message is that “there’s more than one way to murder someone, and the narrator, in his vaudevillian, repetitive cruelty, is the real murderer.”1 So we are meant to see the moral shortcomings of both of the central characters, and the piece appears to make a case for moral relativism: the speaker’s moral pronouncements are comically undermined and the poem seems consistent with postmodernism’s refusal to construct a moral hierarchy.”
Also, this isn’t the full poem. There’s more, and it is really funny (and a bit bleak).
Found some analysis on it:
https://journals.openedition.org/sillagescritiques/4840
“In my own correspondence with Kennard he suggested that the poem’s message is that “there’s more than one way to murder someone, and the narrator, in his vaudevillian, repetitive cruelty, is the real murderer.”1 So we are meant to see the moral shortcomings of both of the central characters, and the piece appears to make a case for moral relativism: the speaker’s moral pronouncements are comically undermined and the poem seems consistent with postmodernism’s refusal to construct a moral hierarchy.”
Also, this isn’t the full poem. There’s more, and it is really funny (and a bit bleak).