Death in Her Hands

Ottessa Moshfegh’s Death in Her Hands subverts the traditional murder mystery by using the genre’s framework to explore solipsism, the philosophical idea that only one’s own mind is sure to exist. The novel begins with a classic premise: the narrator, Vesta Gul, finds a note implying a murder. However, instead of searching for external clues, Vesta constructs the entire narrative internally, inventing the victim, the suspects, and the motive. This metafictional approach, in which a text comments on its own creation, turns the focus from solving a crime to the act of storytelling itself. Vesta acknowledges this directly, thinking, “I could write the book myself if I had the discipline” (4). By replacing objective reality with Vesta’s imagination, Moshfegh defies the conventions of classic detective fiction, such as the evidence-based methods in Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot series, where truth is an external puzzle to be solved.

Moshfegh’s novel pushes the popular “unreliable narrator” trope, seen in psychological thrillers like Gillian Flynn’s 2012 novel Gone Girl, to a more radical conclusion. While Flynn’s narrators intentionally manipulate a shared reality to deceive others, Vesta’s unreliability stems from a solipsistic state in which her inner world becomes more real to her than the external one.