The Linguistics of Stephen King by James Arthur Anderson

Author:James Arthur Anderson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland
Published: 2017-06-30T04:00:00+00:00

Readers become completely immersed in King’s fictional world and find that they have difficulty putting the book down because it is so compelling. Once the place and the people become real, the reader has entered a fictional version of Disneyland where the horror comes from “the self-conscious real and imagined fears of the young (which do not vanish even in adulthood) of inadequacy, physical changes, need for love and attention” (Indick 10). Once in such a hyperreality, “as in certain horror films, detachment is impossible; you are not witnessing another’s horror, you are inside the horror through complete synesthesia” (Eco, Travels 46). The horror exists on multiple levels, of course.

As Magistrale and other critics have noted, It is a novel about the evils of child abuse, bullying, and domestic violence and the supernatural/ alien creature that lives beneath Derry can be thought of as an extended metaphor of that evil. As in other King novels, the theme goes beyond the supernatural horror of a scary clown or mythical beings that populate a multiverse of nightmares. The story is used to bring to light real world problems as well. “It is an account of child abuse, about how isolated and vulnerable children are … a veritable treatise on intolerance and prejudice, dealing with hatred of blacks and gays, virtually anyone who is different” (Wiater et al., Stephen King Universe 106). Mike Hanlon is persecuted because he is black, Bill because he stutters, Stan because he is Jewish, Ben because he is overweight, and Richie because he is too smart for his own good. Beverly Marsh goes on to marry an abusive husband, which brings the domestic violence theme into the novel. The boys, unfortunately, must not only battle the supernatural monsters in the story but the real ones as well: the neighborhood bullies, their parents, and their own inner demons and fears. The supernatural It serves as a metaphorical representation of these real problems that, like domestic violence, for example, cannot always be “named” by their victims.

Jean Baudrillard has observed that history has been recreated by the media. “Today, the history that is ‘given back’ to us (precisely because it was taken from us) has no more of a relation to a ‘historical real’ than neofiguration in painting does to the classical figuration of the real” (Simulacra 45). This idea appears in It when the news media arrive after the crisis to cover the story:

The network news reporters would bring some version of the truth home to most people; they would make it real although there were those who might have suggested that reality is a highly untrustworthy concept, something perhaps no more solid than a piece of canvas stretched over an interlacing of cables like the strands of a spiderweb [1060].

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.