Perspective
Then novel is told in the form of a first person confession by Walter Huff. This affords the author the ability to allow his narrator to inform the readers of the factual events as they chronologically unfold while also endowing the narrative with an ironic texture because Huff already knows how things turn out.
Phyllis
Keep in mind that by the time Walter writes about it, he already knows everything about Phyllis, including some deep, dark secrets about her past that he will learn after the point at which we are being introduced. Phyllis turns out to be the blackest of black widows which makes her introduction all the more ironic with her “sweet face, light blue eyes and dusty blond hair. She was small, and had on a suit of blue house pajamas.”
Walter the Helpless
The tragic part of the book’s ironic narration is that it affords a glimpse into a mind that acutely aware of how deep into the middle of the spider’s web he has allowed himself to be entangled. Walter may be something of a sap, but he’s no idiot. He is intensely aware of the danger that Phyllis represents and situates that circumstances in a profoundly ironic image: “I loved her like a rabbit loves a rattlesnake.”
House of Death
The persistent sense of irony pervading throughout the novel begins with an image in the opening paragraph of a beautiful if not particularly distinguishable home in an upscale Los Angeles suburb. The house is notable neither for being architecturally different from those around it nor for its notoriety. And yet it is known across the city as the “House of Death.”
The Banality of Evil
Double Indemnity was published two years after Cain’s breakthrough work The Postman Always Rings Twice. In its tale of sexual obsession bringing together an adulterous wife who seduces a man into helping to off her husband to get at his money, it was accused by some of being merely a rehash. In reality, it was an ironic commentary upon reader reaction to that story. The husband is poorly educated and crude immigrant, the wife is seen as something of a floozy and the boyfriend is a drifter; in other words, all fit the expected “criminal type.” Cain’s response to this was to tell a story about a far more grotesquely evil couple whose crimes cannot be so easily and conveniently explained away as consequences of “natural” types or inclinations. The real horror at the center of Double Indemnity is that it presented a portrait of evil not so just commonplace that it could live among readers unnoticed, but as something as banal and boring as an insurance policy discussion.
