My Friend Dahmer

Prologue-Part 2

Reading Check

1. Biology (Part 1)

2. “[H]aving ‘total control’ over him” (Part 1)

3. His mother (Part 1)

4. With alcohol (Part 2)

5. Amusing (Part 2)

6. “[B]eating trees with large sticks” (Part 2)

7. Their divorce (Part 2)

Short Answer

1. On a walk, the boy (Dahmer) comes across a dead cat. He picks up the carcass and takes it back to his house. When a group of boys asks about the animal carcass, he replies “I’m gonna dissolve it… in some acid.” (Prologue)

2. The narrator recalls that while entering a middle school would usually provide opportunity for students to mingle and make new friends, Dahmer did not have any friends, as most people ignored him or treated him with “contempt.” (Part 1)

3. Dahmer lived with his mother Joyce, father Lionel, and brother Dave. Since the narrator did not speak with Dave too much, he shares his observations of Dahmer’s parents. He describes Lionel as hardworking and “more comfortable with test tubes than with teenage sons” and Joyce as “a housewife who was chafing in that role, like many moms in the early seventies.” (Part 1)

4. As Backderf reflects on the sexual awakening that his age group was experiencing, he notes how Dahmer had a difficult time realizing that he was gay. Furthermore, his sexual fantasies centered on men who were dead, a “perverse sexual hunger” that Dahmer later shared he “didn’t know where it came from.” (Part 1)

5. After revealing the difficult home environment that Dahmer grew up in, Backderf asks the question, “[W]here were the damn adults?” This dialogue is paired with the visual of Dahmer staring longingly out the window at the jogger. (Part 1)

6. Dahmer is fishing with his friend Neil at a manmade lake, discussing a recent classmate’s death by suicide. Neil tells Dahmer to throw back any fish they find, but Dahmer instead chooses to pull out a knife and chop up the fish he catches because he “wanted to see what it looked like.” (Part 2)

7. On a school trip to Washington DC, Dahmer is able to convince an aide to let them on a private tour of the Vice President’s office. Backderf notes that it was a “waste” to think that Dahmer had “brains, charm and chutzpah,” but was never able to apply it to something else. (Part 2)

Part 3-Epilogue

Reading Check

1. It was, “a symbol of Dahmer’s wasted youth, the boy who didn’t belong.” (Part 3)

2. The ability to “escape detection” (Part 3)

3. So he could hide his liquor bottles (Part 3)

4. Backderf, “dressed up as Hitler, chatting with Jeffrey Dahmer” (Part 3)

5. “[T]he ostracized leper colony of psycho wretches who occupied the very bottom of the teenage hierarchy” (Part 4)

6. She was leaving Dahmer and moving back to Wisconsin. (Part 4)

Short Answer

1. The Dahmer Fan Club was an activity where Backderf and his friends would include drawings or take pictures of Dahmer throughout the yearbook, even in places where he did not belong. This connected with the bigger idea that Dahmer was, by senior year, a character as opposed to a real person, which his peers found amusing. (Part 3)

2. Dahmer is paid $35 to “perform” his cerebral palsy “act” at the local mall. Backderf and his friends are excited for the prank; however, after he witnesses Dahmer drink 6 beers in the span of 10 minutes, he realizes that something is wrong with Dahmer, and eventually Dahmer is officially excluded from their group. (Part 3)

3. While Backderf chose not to attend Prom because he did not have a date, Dahmer went, asking an underclassman he barely knew. Backderf notes that this was “an anemic grab at normalcy” as he left the dance and spent the evening alone at McDonald’s. (Part 4)

4. For Backderf, June 18 is an important date because he leaves home early to start summer school for his first semester at college. For Dahmer, the graphic novel panels indicate that he picks up a male hitchhiker, alluding to the fact that this is most likely his first victim. (Part 4)

5. Derf and his two friends reunite 10 years after their high school graduation. As they discuss their classmates’ futures, the friends talk about Dahmer, among other people. Derf states that, “Dahmer is probably a serial killer by now!” making his friends laugh. (Epilogue)