In the midst of the school shooting, after having already killed several people, Peter sits down in the blood-filled Sterling High cafeteria and eats a bowl of Rice Krispies, before getting up and continuing with the shooting. The Rice Krispies are understood by many in the novel to symbolize Peter’s monstrous lack of compassion and remorse, and his ability to think about himself in the midst of committing unimaginable acts of violence. The fact that Peter eats a children’s breakfast cereal, of all foods, is also significant. For a novel so concerned about the loss of innocence during the transition from childhood to adulthood, Rice Krispies symbolize the innocence of childhood, which makes them an especially jarring choice for Peter to eat in the middle of a school shooting. Indeed, the Rice Krispies serve as a reminder that, despite being a mass murderer, Peter is also still a child at the same time.
During his trial, the prosecution’s lawyer, Diana Leven, holds up the Rice Krispies box as evidence that Peter committed the act of shooting in cold blood, and that he showed a chilling lack of compassion and mercy for his victims. Yet on the other hand, the forensic psychiatrist called by the defense, Dr. King Wah, uses the Rice Krispies as evidence that Peter was dissociating as a result of PTSD while he committed the shooting. Dr. Wah claims that there is no other explanation for how a person could calmly sit down and eat cereal in the middle of perpetrating mass murder. Due to these two wildly different interpretations of their significance, the Rice Krispies also come to represent the ways in which people tend to believe what they were already inclined to believe, rather than responding to evidence in an open-minded, balanced way. Those who think Peter is a monster see the Rice Krispies as evidence of that, while those who believe he was a traumatized victim cite the Rice Krispies as evidence of the opposite.
Rice Krispies Symbol Timeline in Nineteen Minutes
