The Unsorted BBS Collection/thegreatunsorted.tar/thegreatunsorted/texts/term_papers/skfinal.txt

Text File | 1994-10-26 | 10KB | 165 lines

                          Stephen King
     Stephen King is a very well known contemporary author.  His
works have constantly topped the best seller lists.  His novels
have been made into successful motion picture and television
productions.  In order to better understand his works it is
necessary to take a look at this life and the climate of the time
when he was growing up.  Also viewing idea's of other critics
pertaining to a particular work can give the reader a better sense
of understanding.
     As King puts it, "I grew up in a real rural environment, and
I've been writing about it ever since."  Even today King is living
in Bangor, Maine which is another rural environment.  His rural
background has provided a backdrop for many of his novels.  The
most noticeable of these is `Salem's Lot which King based the
setting on his own home town of Bangor.
     King also pulls ideas for his works from his life experiences.
For example in his book The Shining there are billboards carved out
of hedges.  He got the idea from billboards in Vermont.  "They're
on Route 2 in Vermont... The words of the add have been clipped out
of hedges."  King himself sums it up the best. "You write about
places you know."
     In addition to getting ideas for his novels from his
environment he gets them from his own life experiences and the
experiences of his family.  For example when King was young he fell
down during an ice hockey game and split his head open on the ice.
In his book The Dead Zone Johnny Smith falls down ice skating and
cracks his head open.
     King got the idea for Pet Semetary when his daughter's cat was
run over by a car and then buried in the local "Pet Semetary."
King says he got the idea crossing the street to his car after the
cat was buried, "On one side of the road, I wondered what would
happen if that cat came back to life.  By the time I got to the
other side, I wondered what would happen if a human came back to
life."
     King tries to make his novels seem as life like as possible so
that it will be easier to lull the reader into a sense of normalcy
before scaring them.  One way that he does this is by using his own
fear of rats.  "... and I thought, what if someone said, `I need a
pillow,' and the stewardess opened the overhead rack and all these
rats came out into her face, and she started to scream, and the
rats were biting off her nose."  In this passage King shows that he
has thought about the idea of rats.  In one of his first books,
`Salem's Lot a scene involving rats coming out of a dead person's
mouth was edited because the publishers considered it too
grotesque.
     King has a fascination with fire.  He calls it the "werewolf"
inside of him.  One of the epic scenes in The Stand involves a
character named Trashcan Man blowing up many things explained in
vivid detail.
     One reason King writes horror his because he sees it as a
"kind of psychological protection."  Also King says, "It's [writing
horror] like drawing a magic circle around me and my family.  My
mother used to say, `If you think the worst it can't come true.'
... If you write a novel where the bogeyman gets someone else's
children, then maybe they'll never get your own children."  If this
is true then King does a great job of protecting his children by
using Jake, Roland's only companion in The Gunslinger.  When Roland
first meets Jake he learns by hypnotizing him that he was run over
by a car in New York City.
     In addition to King's lifestyle and personal experiences,
history has affected his writing style and story ideas.  King is a
member of "The first generation to grow up completely in the shadow
of the atomic bomb."  This shows up prominently in two of his
works.  The Gunslinger and The Stand are both "set in a
postapocalypse wasteland" much like what the world might look like
after a nuclear war.
     Modern events help to provide the backdrop for The Stand.
King says, "... The actual impetus to write The Stand came from a
chemical-biological spill in Utah."  In The Stand a mutated flu
like virus accidently gets released from a military laboratory and
kills off most of the worlds population.
     King grew up in the seventies and was tempted to use it as a
setting for his book The Dead Zone.  As he puts it, "I wanted to
talk about the seventies with The Dead Zone.  I didn't want to hit
anyone over the head with it."
     Critics help to give insight into an author's works.  Stephen
King's works have been reviewed by many critics.  Some critics have
valid views while others seem to endlessly ramble on about the
story while not making much sense at all.  The Gunslinger has been
reviewed often, by many different critics, some with good ideas and
others with some not so great ones.
     James Van Hise refers to The Slow Mutants as being, "drawn
out, aimless, and has Roland doing inexplicable things because we
know so little about his motivation.  King is still not letting us
in on what is really going on; everything seems murky and
senseless."  First, so far everything that Roland has done in this
book as had a purpose.  He is chasing the Man in Black because the
Man in Black is the first step in getting to the Dark Tower.
Roland also decides to bring Jake along because Jake serves the
purpose of helping Roland to find the Man in Black.  Secondly it
does not fit Roland's personality to do "senseless" things.  Roland
was trained and brought up in an environment where order and
sensibility were stressed.  Roland is fighting for his life against
the slow mutants and the last thing that he would be doing is
acting insensible.
     Van Hise observes that, "There is a strong implication that
the boy, Jake, is another trap left by the sorcerer."  This is a
good observation because up to this point the only humans that
Roland has encountered up to his point tried to kill him.  In the
town of Tull the Man in Black brainwashed the entire town into
believing that Roland was evil.  When he arrived in town the entire
populous of the town tried to kill him but Roland ended up shooting
them all dead to save his own life.  After an encounter like that
it is easy to see how one could believe Jake is yet another trap
left by the Man in Black.
     Douglas Winter calls Roland's character a knight errant like
person who can establish a new order because of his skill with his
guns.  It may be true that somewhere down the road Roland might be
powerful enough to accomplish a task such as establishing a new
order but he does not have the power at this moment.  The order of
the Gunslingers may have once been powerful but that was long ago,
Roland is the last gunslinger.  Roland is too preoccupied with
survival and reaching the Dark Tower to worry about establishing a
new order.  Whenever King gives the reader insight to Roland's
thoughts the idea of a new order never once appears.  All that
Roland seems to think about is his quest for the tower.
     Winter compares Roland's sacrifice of Jake to "the way his
[Roland's] own youth was sacrificed to become a gunslinger."  This
is a good observation because it points out something the reader
might not have noticed.  With the sacrifice of Jake, King shows two
things about Roland's character.  One is that he will have to make
many great sacrifices in order to complete his quest, and more
importantly he is not going to let anything get in the way of his
goals.
     Tony Magistrale notices that, "Roland has a capacity for
violence that aligns him with the genre of the western and it's
reliance upon a heroic code of male aggressiveness."  He could not
have called that one any better.  Roland is shown to be a violently
aggressive character through out the book.  The first instance is
in the town of Tull when Roland guns down every single resident of
the town rather than run away from them.  The second major example
is when Roland and Jake are chasing the Man in Black through a
railway tunnel and they are besieged by the slow mutants.  Roland
reflexively pulls his guns and starts blasting away at the mutants
without a second thought.  The last example of Rolands
aggressiveness comes when Roland catches up to the Man in Black and
the Man in Black tells Roland to put his guns away because he
cannot be hurt by them.  Roland quickly pulls his guns and starts
shooting at him to no avail.
     Magistrale comments on civilization's passage by using
examples of, "The remains of gasoline pumps, highways, and railway
lines attest not only to civilizations passage but also the
dwindling of mechanical power in the face of magic, the later
raising as technology wanes."  There is no visible evidence that
magic has started to replace technology.  People are using
stagecoaches to get around.  If magic was starting to replace
technology one could logically expect for magic carpets are the
like to be modes of transportation.  There is not one, single,
example of magic growing to take the place of technology.
     Stephen King uses a frightening blend of real life experience
and historical events to make his books seem like a realistic place
that his readers can lose themselves in.  A reader will not quickly
forget a masterfully spun tale of a lone man, trekking across a
vast, "postapcolypic" wasteland in search of an object more
powerful than any human mind can completely comprehend.  As long as
King continues writing such excellent novels he will endear himself
to the hearts of many for generations to come.