What Have You Done (Adler and Dwyer, #0.5)

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses murder, sexual harassment, sexual assault, child abuse, and trauma.

Vultures are a motif throughout the text, presented from the first few pages. Roy first finds Diana’s body as he sees vultures circling her body—noting how “they’re carrion feeders, they stick their faces in dead and rotting flesh. That’s their job—cleanup crew. Not all of nature is beautiful, Roy knows that well enough” (4). The vivid imagery of the vultures circling Diana, then feeding on her body, serves to parallel the horror of her death and disgust over her murder, the central mystery of the novel.

Then, when Roy revisits the field, he notes all the reporters surrounding the police and the scene, which he calls “vultures of another kind” (39). This metaphor, comparing the reporters to vultures, compares the way both “feed” off of Diana’s death, the reporters doing so to garner attention and views for their media. In the last few pages of the text, vultures appear again, as Diana thinks of how she “woke up in that field, looking down at [her] naked body, assaulted once again by those ugly birds. How many ways […] can a girl be assaulted” (295).