Onboard memory… ENGAGE!

Dexter does not work the way I want him to. He does not work for the following reasons:

What I need, for this to work my way, is a character who is conscious of the violence they enact and doing so willfully, thereby making a literature of violence, making a language of it, using it to communicate, to tell stories.

If it’s used to satisfy an urge, then it has a possibility of working, just because it can be conceptually construed as having no other outlet than the violence: the story cannot be correctly told.

Dexter does not work. Yes, he is conscious of the violence he enacts, but the part of him that does the work itself is dissociated from him, from the narrator, from the character. It becomes the Dark Passenger telling a story and using Dexter to do so—which is exactly NOT what I want or need for this to stand a chance of happening.

I need violence to be a mode of communication of the self, self expression. Dexter is interesting because it IS expression, but not of him—it’s the Dark Passenger’s expression, the Dark Passenger using Dexter to tell these stories, to somehow communicate with the outside world that he only gets to reach when this violence occurs.

The Dexter of the novels is very much two personas: Dexter himself, and the Dark Passenger. In the show it seemed, for a moment or so (more like a season), that the man who killed was all there was. There was nothing making him do it; he did it because it was the way things HAD to work, for things to get done.

BOOK
With the Dark Passenger so deeply involved in these interactions, there is no longer any self: Dexter surrenders to the Dark Passenger: The narration is generally first person and the Dark Passenger is referred to as it, never giving it much physical effect. When the Dark Passenger “takes the wheel”, it becomes “we” instead of an “it” and an “I”.
/BOOK

For all of this to work for me and on my terms, the one who violences needs to be an “I”—it has to be present and aggressive and active. It CANNOT be passive and passenger-like.

What would work is the following: if Dexter and the Dark Passenger switched places—if Dexter was the presence in the head of the Dark Passenger, then all of the action would have no other choice except to be active and aggressive. One cannot tell a story by doing nothing!