[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Her punishment of his innocentpresexual interest in his body contributes largely to Frank s fear and loathingof women and to his subsequent career as a rapist and serial killer.Frank sfather, a drunkard, died many years ago, and for whatever kind ofsubstitution it might imply, Frank never wanted to be anything but apoliceman.And his boss, Sheriff Bannerman, refuses to believe that Frank isthe killer, because, as Johnny points out, he is the man you think of as yourown son (King, 226).Chuck Chatsworth s fear arises from a very different source: he wantsto please and fears failing his successful father, whom he idolizes; his readingdisability is a symptom of that fear: he is overanxious to succeed and therebyplease Roger Chatsworth.He is overswinging as his tutor, Johnny Smith,puts it (King, 254).Just these three examples show that in The Dead Zone the relationshipsbetween parents and children are a network of fear and inadequacy.Parentsfail their children; children fear failing their parents.Living fathers, forexample (like Herb Smith or Roger Chatsworth), get fairly high marks forcaring, while dead ones, blameable by their very absence, are seen as meanor weak.Mothers, living or dead, are usually neutral figures (ShelleyChatsworth), or weak (the late Mrs.Stillson), or strangely warped (VeraSmith, Henrietta Dodd).Moving beyond questions of characters intrafamilial relations witheach other to questions of their own value systems, we see the same kinds ofshortcomings and failings at work.People ask themselves, What can Ibelieve? or, How can I make sense of my life? and their answers areinadequate to the extent that they arise from ideology or dogmatism.The litmus test for such dogmatism is John Smith, or rather two eventsin his life: his unlikely recovery from a years-long coma and the revelation ofhis psychic power.We see at once that those characters who respond mostinadequately to the phenomena presented by the existence of John Smith arethose whose beliefs are most fixed.Such rigidity shows the mind, constrained Some Ways of Reading The Dead Zone 89by its own belief-sets, unable to handle actuality.Dr.James Brown, forexample, is a scientific materialist.Because he cannot explain Johnny speculiar power according to his own principles, he refuses to admit that itexists.As Brown s colleague Sam Weizak explains to Johnny, He thinks youare having us on.His cast of mind makes it impossible for him to thinkotherwise.He is a mechanic of the brain.He has cut it to pieces with hisscalpel and found no soul.Therefore there is none (King, 119).Browndislikes Johnny Smith because the fact of him threatens Brown; Johnpossesses something that Brown s medical training cannot explain or dealwith, that training having been wholly within the rational order.Quite irrational, but equally rigid and inadequate, is Vera Smith s beliefthat her son is specially marked by God.Herb and Vera know nothing ofJohnny s psychic power ( neither of them had any idea, says Johnny [King,150] on the night of Vera s stroke), but Vera firmly believes that aninterventionist God brought Johnny out of his four-and-a-half-year coma todo something.During that period Vera has been moving toward cultic,fundamentalist beliefs, and now she has arrived at the lunatic fringe.If Dr.Brown s view of reality has essentially only one dimension, Vera s has twogood versus evil.On the one side are the rapture, the miracle-working God,the deus ex flying saucer, and the apocalypse; on the other are the agents ofSatan who run this world (doctors mostly).It is easy to make fun of Vera andher beliefs, but that is only because she has taken her rejection of human willand human responsibility to an extreme.She refuses to take her bloodpressure medicine because if God wants her to live He will see to it, and ifHe wants her to die He will see to that: It was a seamless argument andJohnny s only possible rebuttal was the one that Catholics and Protestantsalike have rejected for eighteen hundred years: that God works his willthrough the mind of man as well as through the spirit of man (King, 133).Poles apart as they are, Vera s views and Dr.Brown s view are alike inthe inadequacy of their response to complexity.Still, Vera s views at leasthave consequences for Johnny: her last words to him are Do your duty,John (King, 158), and soon enough John finds the duty he must do.In asecular sense, Vera s command continues to haunt the novel and John Smith slife.Discovering what John Smith s duty is brings us to the political aspectof the novel, and closer to its core.Many things have been established at thispoint in The Dead Zone.For the character of John Smith, these areestablished: his essential decency and humanity; the pain he suffers wheneverhe must use his gift or power; and the loss of other, purely human,satisfactions (such as the rewards of his skill as a teacher) his power brings 90 Michael N.Stantonwith it.As to the power itself, it has been established that it is unpredictablein its appearance, accurate, verifiable and always verified, and almost withoutexception takes as its subject matter loss, crime, and disaster.John Smith sgift does not change in character or quality as the novel proceeds, but thescope of its operation does: from dealing with individual matters like the fateof Sam Weizak s mother or the whereabouts of Sarah Hazlett s ring, todealing with the problems and concerns of entire communities such as CastleRock, Maine, or Durham, New Hampshire.In its final manifestation,Johnny s vision rises to the national level in predicting the career of GregStillson.Equally well-established is the social context in which John Smith spower is operating
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]