Darkly Dreaming Dexter

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of graphic violence, blood, domestic violence, and child abuse.

Dexter’s Dark Passenger is the embodiment of Dexter’s darkness. It is the name he gives to his inner thirst for violence and his homicidal urges. As such, it is the novel’s primary symbol of unrepentant serial violence. In Dexter’s estimation, the Passenger is always with him as a passenger accompanying its driver. When he finds the urge to kill unsurmountable, he feels the Dark Passenger “taking the wheel” and knows that the rational part of his brain is no longer in control.

Although the Dark Passenger lacks humanity and a conscience, Dexter learns to harness the Dark Passenger’s impulses to right the world’s various wrongs. Harry helped him develop a code that dictates what kinds of victims he targets and establishes a rubric for prepared, orderly killing techniques. Harry was a police officer who once saw the world through a black-and-white framework in which killing was evil and police work was good. But as Harry watched killer after killer evade detection, he came to think differently about the nature of good and evil and the utility of vigilante justice. The Dark Passenger thus helps the author to explore

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