Content Warning: This text deals with dark themes including suicide and features scenes of murder and sexual behavior. The source text also contains anti-LGBTQ+ bias, including anti-transgender bias.

“So you’ve decided to commit a murder. Congratulations. Simply by purchasing this volume, you’ve already taken the all-important first step toward a successful homicide of which you can be proud, one that would gain you the admiration of your peers, were they ever to learn of it.”

The opening lines of the novel serve multiple purposes. They first establish the (fake) genre of a non-fiction self-help book with familiar phrases. Secondly, they familiarize the reader with Dean Harrow’s chummy, first-person voice. This enthusiastic narration sets up a major character and the tone for the overall book by playing off the standards of the genre in an absurd and humorous way. The theme of The Use of Humor to Explore Darkness is quickly established as a theme in these early lines and further hints at a second theme, The Moral Complexities of Justice, by first telling the reader their decision to commit murder is admirable but then assumes no one should know about it.

“Before moving forward, you should ask yourself what has come to be known at freshman orientation as the Four Enquiries.”

What follows this quote is an explanation of the four moral questions a student must answer satisfactorily for the faculty before they accept a plan of deletion and sets up the novel’s theme of The Moral Complexities of Justice. The morality and consideration of one’s fellow man that results from contemplating these questions create a complex contrast with the reason for asking them in the first place, the act of murder, and makes what is traditionally thought of as the worst crime less onerous.