For a mystery set out in the middle of nowhere, Revolver sure does pile up the bodies. Einar may have dreamed about finding gold, but the reality is more like bloody corpses and frozen dreams. From Maria's violent and unexpected death to Einar's frozen body on the lake, the novel is one big ick-fest—Wolff makes good and sure of this on more than one occasion, and even Sig gets in on the shooting at times. You can run, but you can't hide from the violence in this book. (Also, reading and running at the same is really hard—just so you know.)
Questions About Violence
- What different kinds of violence do we see in Revolver? What are the tools of violence?
- Does Revolver use violence to help any character succeed? Or is violence the reason everything goes wrong?
- Sig is asked to think about whether a gun is a beautiful, perfect machine, or a recipe for disaster. What does he decide? Do you agree with him?
Chew on This
Over the course of the novel, we see that guns can hurt people even when good people own them.
Despite his mom's protests, Sig learns to appreciate and use a gun to protect himself against the evil people lurking in the world.