Killing them softly: Pillowman assassins in the works of Martin McDonagh and Salman Rushdie

This article draws together the work of novelist Salman Rushdie and playwright and screenwriter Martin McDonagh, who has embraced the epithet "The Irish Salman Rushdie". When considered in tandem, both writers are revealed as irreverent postcolonial artists using absurd representations to mock the hypermasculine persona and reveal its dangerous ideology as a foundation of terrorist thinking. The article traces the trope of the "Pillowman" assassin, used by both writers to signify emasculated male characters who turn to violence out of shame. The inverted logic these characters espouse is examined and shown to signal the fallacy of accepting violence as an essential facet of masculinity. When viewed in this framework, the work of Rushdie and McDonagh suggests that the drive towards aggressive masculinity in postcolonial settings acts as a vestigial by-product of the colonial power structure.