as Hankins (1976) suggests. Matt is capable of feelings of love, but these are always connected with a desire to possess the person who is loved. He also understands, at least in regard to MaryAnn, that love and the possession that comes with it is in a fundamental way incompatible with innocence - at least once we have passed the portal of childhood.
MaryAnn is the pivot of the action of the story: Frank loves her and takes her away from Richard, who has loved and possessed her, and so Richard kills Frank. And then Matt, who has loved and in a different way possessed Frank, kills Richard. This is a story about the people that men love and the price that they put on that love, and the price that is owed to them in compensation when the person they love is taken away by another man.
We see Matt's understanding of the ways in which love becomes entwined with the idea of possession (and so why the loss of love becomes entwined with the necessity for revenge, for "pay back" - another metaphor that equates the loss of a loved one with other more easily calculable costs) in the way in whi
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