Twilight

"Because I knew the thoughts of my prey, I could pass over the innocent and pursue only the evil. If I followed a murderer down a dark alley where he stalked a young girl — if I saved her, then surely I wasn’t so terrible." (Meyer, 343)

Vigilantism is romanticized, and, in an already grandiose and highly romantic book, it's not unsurprising to locate it here. The idea of justice is there- if you kill the killers, you're doing good, and you're saving more than you're hurting. For surely the people who murder wantonly deserve to die, and taking them out is no small task, or a needless one. Unfortunately, that is simply rationalizing the reality- Edward Cullen, like other people with that mindset, are actually assuming the role of the murderer in a fashion that transforms them into worse than their prey. Their prey has no chance of evading them, not when they are, as Edward himself has stated, the "perfect predator- everything invites you in".

Stylistically speaking, the first sentence in this excerpt begins with which I've never informed never to start a sentence- 'because'. Meyer's style is reminiscent of the age group at which her books are targeted. Although Edward occasionally speaks like he's been ripped from the pages of a Gothic novel, he invokes colloquialisms and American speech patterns too.

True, he doesn't say it as baldly and bluntly as someone from this age might. Also true, there is, as there tends to be in many of Edward's statements, a certain poetry, even about the simplest things. It is easy to find him alluring based on that, when almost no one in our day and age speaks like that.

In this book, the Cullens are considered to be the "good guys". This quote further exemplifies this because "how can someone who kills the killers be a bad person"? It also relates to the idea of a vampire as a dark shadow in the night- the murderer surely didn't see him coming and he blends into the darkness, only to strike out.