Different Seasons

“What was right with him he'd only give you a little at a time. What was wrong with him he kept bottled up inside. If he ever had a dark night of the soul, as some writer or other has called it, you would never know.”

This passage summarizes Andy’s story arc as essentially flat. He changes very little in the course of the story from Red’s perspective. If Andy ever had a “dark night of the soul,” there is no sign of it. Andy is a catalyst for Red’s transformation and redemption.

“Listen: I knew this guy, Sherwood Bolton, his name was, and he had this pigeon in his cell. From 1945 until 1953, when they let him out, he had that pigeon… Jake, he called him. He set Jake free a day before he, Sherwood, that is, was to walk, and Jake flew away just as pretty as you could want. But about a week after Sherwood Bolton left our happy little family, a friend of mine called me over to the west corner of the exercise yard, where Sherwood used to hang out, and my friend said: 'Isn't that Jake, Red?' It was. That pigeon was just as dead as a turd.”

Jake is a metaphor for what happens to long-time prisoners, at least in Red’s observation: They lose their ability to live outside. Sherwood may have been released, but some part of him, represented by Jake, returns until it dies. King’s choice of a pigeon, a carrier of messages, emphasizes the fact that Jake metaphorically tells Red and his friend what has happened to Sherwood.

“All I know for sure is that Andy Dufresne wasn't much like me or anyone else I ever knew since I came inside. […] [He] managed to bring in […] a sense of his own worth, maybe, or a feeling that he would be the winner in the end or maybe it was only a sense of freedom, even inside these goddamned grey walls. It was a kind of inner light he carried around with him.”

Red specifically says that Andy is not like him. The characteristics that Red then lists that he himself lacks, particularly a sense of worth and hope and Andy’s inner light, emphasizes the Christlike redeemer imagery that King associated with Andy. Later, Red will remark that Andy actually represents the spark of hope that everyone carries within them.

“‘Zihuatanejo,' [Andy] said, rolling the word softly from his tongue like music. 'Down in Mexico. It's a little place maybe twenty miles from Playa Azul and Mexico Highway 37. It's a hundred miles north-west of Acapulco on the Pacific Ocean. You know what the Mexicans say about the Pacific?'

I told him I didn't.

'They say it has no memory. And that's where I want to finish out my life, Red. In a warm place that has no memory.'”

Here, Andy is giving Red directions on how to reach the quasi-paradise when he gets out. He is also promising that all will be forgiven and forgotten when Red gets there. Andy, in his role of savior, is promising redemption. Later, he will repeat the name again, just to make sure that it sticks in Red’s mind.

“Well, you weren't writing about yourself, I hear someone in the peanut-gallery saying. You were writing about Andy Dufresne. You're nothing but a minor character in your own story. But you know, that's just not so. It's all about me, every damned word of it. Andy was the part of me they could never lock up, the part of me that will rejoice when the gates finally open for me and I walk out in my cheap suit with my twenty dollars of mad-money in my pocket That part of me will rejoice no matter how old and broken and scared the rest of me is. I guess it's just that Andy had more of that part than me, and used it better.”

This quotation encapsulates the nature of this novella’s frame story and its primary narrative. Red is the one who is changed and redeemed, and Andy is the agent of that change. Red’s belief is also the moral of the story: We all have the spark of hope and determination that Andy represents.

“Sure I remember the name. Zihuatanejo. A name like that is just too pretty to forget. I find I am excited, so excited I can hardly hold the pencil in my trembling hand. I think it is the excitement that only a free man can feel, a free man starting a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain.

I hope Andy is down there.

I hope I can make it across the border.

I hope to see my friend and shake his hand.

I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams. I hope.”

“Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption” ends on the motif of hope. Andy has extended the hand of hope to the floundering Red. Leaving the walls of Shawshank didn’t give Red freedom; only Andy can do that by giving Red the hope of redemption in heaven, represented by Zihuatanejo. In particular, the line, “I hope to see my friend” is reminiscent of the Christian idea of meeting Christ in heaven (see 1 Thessalonians 4:17).

“‘I was given orders and directives, which I followed.' Todd's smile widened; it was now almost a smirk.

'Oh, I know how the Americans have distorted that,' Dussander muttered. 'But your own politicians make our Dr. Goebbels look like a child playing with picture books in a kindergarten. They speak of morality while they douse screaming children and old women in burning napalm. Your draft-resisters are called cowards and "peaceniks". For refusing to follow orders they are either put in jails or scourged from the country. Those who demonstrate against this country's unfortunate Asian adventure are clubbed down in the streets. The GI soldiers who kill the innocent are decorated by Presidents, welcomed home from the bayoneting of children and the burning of hospitals with parades and bunting.’”

Dussander makes a point regarding the hypocrisy of war and the way suffering is both condemned and justified by the same side. Dussander is one of many examples in Different Seasons in which King draws attention to injustices in America, but in this case, he directly compares them to that committed by the state of another country.

“And as Richard liked to say, for a kid the whole world's a laboratory. You have to let them poke around in it. And if the kid in question has a healthy home life and loving parents, he'll be all the stronger for having knocked around a few strange corners.

And there went the healthiest kid she knew, pedaling up the street on his Schwinn. We did okay by the lad, she thought, turning to make her sandwich. Damned if we didn't do okay.”

Todd’s parents are a vital element of King’s characterization of Todd. The Bowdens believe in leaving Todd be—in other words, they provide little nurture. Monica Bowden has no idea to what her son is being exposed. Ironically, Monica congratulates herself on how emotionally “healthy” Todd is, unable to see past his disingenuous surface, emphasizing both Todd’s capacity for manipulation and the environment that fosters his wrongdoings.

“Dick Bowden didn't want to make [Todd] mad. He and his son were friends, always had been friends, and Dick wanted things to stay that way. They had no secrets from each other, none at all (except for the fact that Dick Bowden was sometimes unfaithful with his secretary, but that wasn't exactly the sort of thing you told your thirteen-year-old son, was it? and besides, that had absolutely no bearing on his home life, his family life).”

Dick Bowden’s hypocrisy is similarly on full display here. He believes that he knows everything about his son and that truth is important, yet he himself lies and betrays his family. Ultimately, he values appearance over substance, and he avoids unpleasantness rather than facing reality. King implicitly compares his hypocrisy to the hypocrisy that Dussander identifies in American culture; this becomes explicit later at the family dinner when Dussander observes Dick’s similarly perverted interest in the Holocaust.

“'Achtung?'

[Dussander] snapped to attention, and for a moment Todd was scared­–really scared. He felt like the sorcerer's apprentice, who had brought the brooms to life but who had not possessed enough skill to stop them once they got started. The old man living on his pension was gone. Dussander was here.

Then his fear was replaced by a tingling sense of power.”

This passage foreshadows the future when Dussander begins to assume power over Todd. Todd experiences a momentary doubt in his own ability to control and manipulate adults, but he dismisses it the same way that his father dismissed the flash of anger he saw in Todd’s face.

“'It's a city ordinance,' Dave said. 'Can't have dog-packs running the streets.'

'You shoot them.'

'No, we give them gas. It's very humane. They don't feel a thing.'

'No,' Mr. Denker said. 'I am sure they don't.'”

The irony in this passage is that Dussander knows more about killing with gas than the worker at the shelter. The implication is that Dussander is literally resuming his old role from the past. The word “humane” ironically draws attention to Dussander’s dehumanizing actions, and that of Todd’s in the novella, too.

“'Down deep inside, I don't like you. Nothing could make me like you. You forced yourself on me. You are an unbidden guest in my house. You have made me open crypts perhaps better left shut, because I have discovered that some of the corpses were buried alive, and that a few of those still have some wind left in them.

'You yourself have become enmeshed, but do I pity you because of that? Gott im Himmel! You have made your bed; should I pity you if you sleep badly in it?’”

Dussander is stating the crux of the relationship between he and Todd. All along, he has understood that Todd was playing with fire. Naturally, they have grown to hate and fear each other for the way they have corrupted each other, setting loose the impulses that had previously been restrained. This statement emphasizes Dussander’s character development from a more dormant to a once-again murderous character.

“‘The things that happened in those camps still have power enough to make the stomach flutter with nausea. […] But maybe there is something about what the Germans did that pleases and excites us–something that opens the catacombs of the imagination. […] Black serendipity. Maybe we know that under the right set of circumstances the things that live in the catacombs would be glad to crawl out. And what do you think they would look like? Like mad Fuehrers with forelocks and shoe-polish moustaches, heiling all over the place? Like red devils, or demons, or the dragon that floats on its stinking reptile wings?'

'I don't know,' Richler said.

'I think most of them would look like ordinary accountants,' Weiskopf said. 'Little mind-men with graphs and flow-charts and electronic calculators […]. And some of them might look like Todd Bowden.'”

This is the key message of the King’s novella. Part of the enduring horror of the German concentration camps is the recognition that ordinary people could commit such atrocities. In keeping with King’s discussions of racism and injustices in American in “Apt Pupil,” he uses Weiskopf’s character to emphasize that the “all-American” look of Todd Bowden is not innocent. Weiskopf’s reference to men “with graphs and flow-charts” alludes to figures such as Adolf Eichmann, the engineer of the camps.

“The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them–words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important.”

The narrator of “The Body”, Gordie, is explaining the necessity of stories, a motif in every novella in Different Seasons. As a boy, he underwent a coming-of-age in which he learned something too big and complex to put into simple words in a way that other people can understand. Only by going through the story with him can the meaning be comprehended.

“'This is really a good time,' Vern said simply, and he didn't just mean being off-limits inside the dump, or fudging our folks, or going on a hike up the railroad tracks into Harlow; he meant those things but it seems to me now that there was more, and that we all knew it. Everything was there and around us. We knew exactly who we were and exactly where we were going. It was grand.”

In this passage, King reinforces Gordie’s belief that the most significant things are the hardest to convey. The boys are experiencing, possibly for the first and probably for the last time, the sense of perfect self-possession. They have thrown off adult rules and adult supervision, and they are for the moment in the special world of the archetypal quest.

“Behind me I could hear Chopper coming, shaking the earth, blurting fire out of one distended nostril and ice out of the other, dripping sulphur from his champing jaws.”

Gordie describes Chopper as a mythological monster: a dragon, a common feature of chivalric romance. The boys are on a mythic quest without ever leaving the real world. The adult world with all its unknowns looms larger than life in their psyches.

“'And whatever's between you and your old man, talk can't change that.' Teddy's head shook without definition, unsure if this was true. [Chris] had redefined his pain, and redefined it in shockingly common terms. That would (loony) have to be examined (fucking section eight) later. In depth. On long sleepless nights.”

Chris is the toughest of all the boys, yet he also has a way of seeing through their troubles to the things that matter, and he has the ability to risk emotional intimacy. His ability to transform and reframe pain is part of his characterization of a knight–here, he rescues Teddy.

“I went because of the shadows that are always somewhere behind our eyes, because of what Bruce Springsteen calls the darkness on the edge of town in one of his songs, and at one time or another I think everyone wants to dare that darkness in spite of the jalopy bodies that some joker of a God gave us human beings. No not in spite of our jalopy bodies but because of them.”

Here, Gordie is talking specifically about seeing Evel Knievel jump a canyon. Symbolically, he is talking about the human need to test themselves against death to see if they can survive. The boys on their quest to view a dead body are challenging death by looking at it; horror writers and their readers are challenging death, too.

“It's like God gave you something, all those stories you can make up, and He said, This is what we got for you, kid. Try not to lose it. But kids lose everything unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks are too fucked up to do it then maybe I ought to.'

His face looked like he was expecting me to take a swing at him; it was set and unhappy in the green-gold late afternoon light. He had broken the cardinal rule for kids in those days.”

The cardinal rule, King implies in “The Body,” is to never criticize another kid’s parents—in essence calling attention to the shortcomings in a friend’s home-life. Chris is taking, for Gordie, the same role that he takes with the other two boys, acting as a father. Later, King will emphasize Gordie’s character development when he reciprocates Chris’s care for him, allowing Chris to release the father role and pursue his own dream for a better future.

“We were clinging to each other in deep water. I've explained about Chris, I think; my reasons for clinging to him were less definable. His desire to get away from Castle Rock and out of the mill's shadow seemed to me to be my best part, and I could not just leave him to sink or swim on his own. If he had drowned, that part of me would have drowned with him, I think.”

To the rest of the world, Chris is a ne’er do well, but in “The Body” he is the knight figure in the quest and Gordie recognizes Chris’s combination of courage, strength, tenderness. For Gordie, Chris represents the ideal man that he struggles to be. Rather than see that ideal pulled down and drowned by a world that can’t see it, Gordie struggles to uplift Chris to the height that matches his virtue.

“At the corner of 3rd and Fortieth, a large tinsel Christmas bell went floating through the intersection like a spirit. 'Bad night,' the cabbie said. "They'll have an extra two dozen in the morgue tomorrow. Wino Popsicles. Plus a few bag-lady Popsicles.'

'I suppose.'

The cabbie ruminated. 'Well, good riddance,' he said finally. 'Less welfare, right?'

'Your Christmas spirit,' I said, 'is stunning in its width and depth.'

The cabbie ruminated. 'You one of those bleeding-heart liberals?' he asked finally.”

This passage establishes the time of year (if the section title did not). It also invokes Charles Dickens’s iconic story, “A Christmas Carol” (1843), with references to a Christmas bell floating “like a spirit” and the cabbie’s commentary on the deaths by exposure that will certainly occur before morning–reminiscent of Ebenezer Scrooge’s “they should die and reduce the surplus population” (Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Books. Oxford University Press, 2008). Like the pre-redemption Scrooge, the cabbie is scornful of David’s sympathy for his fellow man.

“The thought which had come to me when Ellen asked me about my evening was as ridiculous as the one I'd entertained about George Waterhouse as the cab drew away from me–what in God's name could be wrong with telling my wife about a perfectly harmless evening at my boss's stuffy men's club and even if something were wrong with telling her, who would know that I had? No, it was every bit as ridiculous and paranoid as those earlier musings and, my heart told me, every bit as true.”

David’s undefined sense of reluctance to tell his wife about the club has to do with maintaining the boundaries of men’s and women’s worlds in the gendered commentary of the novella. In keeping with Different Season’s treatment of stories, a true account of his experience could never be fully communicated to another person anyway. As Gordie notes at the beginning of “The Body,” there are some truths that can’t be put into words in a way that would make sense to another person.

“Birth is wonderful, gentlemen, but I have never found it beautiful–not by any stretch of the imagination. I believe it is too brutal to be beautiful. A woman's womb is like an engine. With conception, that engine is turned on. At first it barely idles but as the creative cycle nears the climax of birth, that engine revs up and up and up. Its idling whisper becomes a steady running hum, and then a rumble, and finally a bellowing, frightening roar. Once that silent engine has been turned on, every mother-to-be understands that her life is in check. Either she will bring the baby forth and the engine will shut down again, or that engine will pound louder and harder and faster until it explodes, killing her in blood and pain.”

Emlyn McCarron gives a gruesome and unromantic description of pregnancy and childbirth suitable to a horror story. His description evokes helplessness and fear and highlights Sandra’s strength of will that she drove that engine and controlled it, even transcending death to do so.