Themes

Guilt and regret

One of the main themes of the novel Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin is the theme of guilt. This is shown in several ways throughout the novel. For example, Larry feels guilty for not stopping Wallace from murdering Tina Rutherford: “Larry thought of Wallace, what he’d done to that poor girl, raping her, killing her, burying her in the dirt. Thinking what he, Larry, might have done to stop what happened, what he could’ve said thinking in a way it was his fault” (p. 287). 

Larry also shows he feels guilty for calling Silas a racial slur when they were young, and he wants to apologize, even thirty years later, showing he never forgot the incident and that he feels true remorse: “ ‘The thing,’ Larry said, ‘that I wanted to tell you that first time, when you didn’t want to talk to me, was that I was sorry. About what I said, when Dad...