Stephen King by Bev Vincent

Author:Bev Vincent
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: becker&mayer! books ISBN
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Scribner’s hardcover edition, released four years after The Green Mile first appeared in monthly installments.

King sits in the electric chair on the set of The Green Mile, with director Frank Darabont (left) and star Tom Hanks.

Tom Hanks and Michael Clarke Duncan in a scene from the 1999 film adaptation of The Green Mile.

The Green Mile takes place on E Block in Cold Mountain State Penitentiary in 1932 in an unspecified Southern state. As a framing device, King establishes a first-person narrator, Paul Edgecombe, the former block supervisor, who is recounting those long-ago events from a Georgia nursing home. E Block is the place where prisoners await their date with the electric chair. King says, “‘Old Sparky’ has fascinated me ever since my first James Cagney movie, and the first Death Row tales I ever read (in a book called Twenty Thousand Years in Sing Sing, written by Warden Lewis E. Lawes) fired the darker side of my imagination. What, I wondered, would it be like to walk those last forty yards to the electric chair, knowing you were going to die there? What, for that matter, would it be like to be the man who had to strap the condemned in . . . or pull the switch? What would such a job take out of you? Even creepier, what might it add?”251

The lives of the guardians of E Block are complicated by the introduction of a gentle giant, a simple man accused of the brutal murders of two young girls. He was found with the dead girls in his lap, and his statement upon arrest seemed to acknowledge his culpability. The character King first called Luke Coffey became John Coffey, and his touch could heal. “I decided to give him the initials J.C., after the most famous innocent man of all time,” King said. “I wasn’t sure, right up to the end of the book, if my J.C. would live or die. I wanted him to live because I liked and pitied him, but I figured those initials couldn’t hurt, one way or the other.”252

King also gives readers ample reason to question whether Coffey is guilty, and whether the electric chair is a fitting punishment for any person. Through the grotesquely botched execution of Eduard Delacroix (a symbolic name meaning “of the cross”), an endearing character who freely admits his guilt and is remorseful about his actions, King depicts the potential barbarism of capital punishment. Understandably, some readers drew conclusions about King’s personal beliefs about it, but he counters, “I think there’s an assumption, based on the book, that I’m against the death penalty. I’m not. I’m against it in ninety-nine percent of the cases where it’s used. I believe it should be an absolute last resort. That it should never be used without eyewitness testimony that the crimes took place. There is only one justification for the death penalty that I understand: the people who are executed never do it again.”253

The book’s villains aren’t the convicted killers on death row—except, perhaps, for William “Billy the Kid” Wharton, who is truly heinous.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.