Thomas Harris and William Blake: Allusions in the Hannibal Lecter Novels

This work examines the allusions to Blake throughout Harris’s four Hannibal Lecter novels and provides a Blakean reading of the works as a whole, particularly in regard to the character of Lecter and the nature of evil in the world. Blake’s works and philosophy provide a foundation for reading these novels as an exploration of how humanity should view evil and to what extent evil should be accepted.

After establishing a Blakean view of evil, the book then explores Harris’s novels and their film versions, which reveal that Harris uses Blake to suggest that good and evil are intertwined and coexist, and that it is foolish to try to see them simply as opposing binaries. Refusing to recognise and acknowledge their intertwined relationship leads to imbalance and a negative outcome, as revealed in the fate of Graham in Red Dragon.However, Lecter’s journey illustrates the appropriate response to evil, one that ends in a marriage of contraries at the end of Hannibal.