Columbine

Eric Harris is one of the two perpetrators of the attack on Columbine High School and has turned eighteen years old the same month the attack is carried out. Cullen describes him as having “all features proportionate,” and that he looked “clean-cut, and all-American.” He had “military-chic hair—short and spiked with plenty of product (6), and a “long pointy nose … a sloping forehead and a weak chin” (7). He often wore the “black T-shirts and baggy cargo pants” (6) that he wore on the day of the attack. He gives himself the nickname Reb.

Harris is consistently illustrated as the mastermind behind the Columbine attack. He is charming, and “fancied himself a noncomformist, but he craved approval and fumed over the slightest disrespect” (7-8). A military brat, Harris’s family moves often when he is young, and he is described as shy but able to make friends easily. Cullen also consistently describes Harris as very intelligent,someone who enjoyed works by Nietzsche, Shakespeare, and Hobbes, among others. Harris maintains a website on which he rants about his contempt for society. While at moments his hateful diatribes focus on specific individuals or demographics, Cullen makes clear that Harris hated society and the world; at one point, while chatting online to a girl he is interested in, he offers that his ideal plane of existence would be one where effectively only he is alive.