Jack CrawfordĬrawford is a behavioral scientist at Quanitco. However, she manages to interpret his notes in the criminal report so well that they lead her right to the door of Buffalo Bill. She is able to unravel complex clues and hints from Lecter, and able to review reports in such a way that she extrapolates information from them that nobody else has seen, but she is also naive, and no true foil for the psychopath. Starling is naive and somewhat out of her depth when it comes to game playing with Dr Lecter.

She seems to find Frederick Chilton more threatening the the man she has come to meet. Starling is young, and inexperienced, but she is confident and capable her skills are greater than the sum of her qualifications and she builds an immediate rapport with Dr Lecter. She seems bright, keen and insightful Crawford chooses her to take the lead in talking to Dr Lecter and trying to solicit his help in finding Buffalo Bill, or deducing who he is. She is training to be an agent and a profiler under Jack Crawford, one of the leading lights in the field of criminal profiling. Lecter is an evil character, a horror-movie 'baddie' whose crimes are almost unimaginable, yet he is also an entertaining character who is presented with a certain degree of humor, which makes him manage to endear himself to the audience, rather than nauseating them entirely with his crimes. He has no doubt that he can outwit Chilton because he does not think much of Chilton's wits in the first place. He accepts Chilton's deal because he knows it will enable him to escape. He is helping Clarice but in doing so is helping himself too. Moreover, Lecter is a chancer, an opportunist. He intends to lead her to Buffalo Bill, but instead of being direct, he constructs a game for her to play in order to get the information that she wants. He likes the fact that she is intelligent, a quality he finds sorely lacking in most of the law enforcement personnel he has met thus far. He likes the fact that she keeps her side of the bargain and tells him insights about herself. He considers it an arrogance when anyone tries to profile him as if he will not notice he becomes angry with Clarice at their first meeting when he believes she is dissecting him. Lecter is pure evil, and his genius and intelligence sharpen this evil so that he is able to out-strategize and outwit everyone sent to challenge him. He tells of how he ate one of his victims 'with some fava beans and a nice chianti'. His comical rhyming nickname was the polar opposite of the depths of his depravity Dr Hannibal Lecter, a brilliant psychiatrist with a passion for murder was known for eating his victims after he killed them. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own. These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community.

Silence of the lambs books