Reflection #2

A Toy For Juliette

by Robert Bloch

1. The protagonist is Juliette and her desire is to have sexual content with people and then when she's done with them, she experiments and kills them. Important traits to note about Juliette yet is that she loves killing people and experimenting on them, it gives her thrills. She also loves to learn about her victims and read up on them after she finish killing them. On top of that, she kept the dead body parts as souvenirs when she was finished with them. 
2. The antagonist would be Jack the Ripper, where in the end he did a surprising twist and killed Juliette before she could kill him. Otherwise, nothing was stopping Juliette because she was never caught for her crimes.
3. The theme of the story would be "don't judge a book by its cover." I would say this is the theme because throughout the story the reader learns how successful Juliette and her grandfather were when it came to kidnapping people from the past and letting Juliette kill them and do whatever she wants with them. Then at the very end, when Juliette let her guard down she was easily killed by Jack the Ripper, not knowing that he was a very expereinced killer when it came to killing women. Also, the reader could tell that both the grandfather and Juliette let their guard down with Jack because before the grandfather gives the victims to Juliette he does a background search to see if that person is a killer or something they need to worry about, yet when the grandfather couldnt find anything on Jack, he still gives her to Juliette.
4. From reading "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper," I've come to understand that Robert Bloch likes to often uses his works in connection with the mentally unstable. Themes such as dystopia, is the idea of a society in which a repressive or controlled state, often under the guise of being utopian, often explore the concept of humans abusing technology and their individuality with collectively coping, or not being able to properly cope with technology that has progressed far more rapidly than humanity's spiritual evolution. Especially since the reason why the grandfather wanted Juliette to continue killing people from the past is because he felt the world couldn't be saved and technology progress could never stop so he thought since humanity will fall eventually, why not quicken it.
5. The crisis action in the story is when Jack the Ripper found the knife under Juliette pillow and stabs her repeatedly with it. Obviously, Juliette did not achieve her goal because her goal was to have sex with Jack and then kill him, but that didn't happen. Plus, when Juliette realized that Jack had the knife, it was too late for her to do anything. On top of that her room was soundproof, so no one could hear her pleas and cries when she was dying.
6. What I enjoyed about this story is the different themes and twists presented. How Bloch brought in Jack the Ripper in the end, I thought was very creativty and unique because its very hard for most authors to do that. Also the way Bloch helps the reader understand or rather see the mind of a sociapath is unique. Its creepy, but at the sametime its amazing to be able to see why certain people do what they do. It makes me wonder if Bloch in a way keeps presenting these themes in his stories because maybe he dealt with similar siutaions in the past or maybe he felt that way about society.