The story is filled with contrasts.
The main one being between notion and reality. Evies expectations of what an inmate is, stands in opposition to Victor: “Victor has none of the staleness about him that most long-term prisonors develop.” (ll. 78-79). Apart from Victors looks, his emotional reaction to the news of his grandmothers death, is also diffrent and therefore in contrast to how one would usualy react. The message of the story is that everything is not what it ought to be.
A theme that is ultimatly symbolised through the butterfly knife that Victor used to kill a man: “She wanders back to the chapel trying to imagine a butterfly knife and the damage it could wreak and wondering at the strangeness of how a thing so hard and sharp, designed to cut, slice and stab, could be named after something so delicate and easy to kill.” (ll. 186-189). The elegant name of the butterfly knife strikes Evie as odd given its brutal capability to do harm. In the same way, Victor’s
