Different Seasons

Content warning: This section of the guide discusses the Holocaust.

The theme running through all four stories is that of men’s relationships. In three of the stories, those friendships are essential to the characters’ well-being. In “Apt Pupil,” the relationship between the young man and the old corrupts both, but even there, the relationship shows how important men are to one another.

Primarily, the role of the masculine relationships in the stories is to create a standard of masculinity for the characters to live up (or down) to. In “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption,” Red and Andy form a friendship of convenience that is never particularly emotionally intimate, but it initiates Red’s character development. Red has been helping Andy to acquire small items that he needs. After Andy’s escape, when Red is finally paroled, he has been so changed by his long years in prison that he is no longer able to function outside. Now Andy reaches back a hand to help Red, giving back far more than the little items that Red found for him. Andy offers Red the same kind of guidance for living outside that Red gave him on living in prison.

The boys in “The Body,” particularly Gordie and Chris, build each other up. King particularly uses Chris to explore the subtleties of these relationships: Chris recognizes that Teddy and Vern are holding him down and will drown him–offering obstacles to the standard of masculinity to which he aspires–Gordie gives Chris the hand that pulls him up. Chris tells Gordie that he is he only one who will amount to anything—that he has a gift that he must use to get out. Chris and Gordie in particular illustrate the chivalric ideal of manhood in medieval chivalric romances, encompassing courtly love, loyalty, courage, and duty.

In the frame story of “The Breathing Method,” the men in the gentlemen’s club offer David Adley belonging in a world of magic and power and wonder that he has missed all his life. The offer is made for reasons that are never given, though King uses David’s enchantment with the other-dimensional library and in the club to indicate a shared sense of cultural capital in an exclusive club. David finds meaning in relationships that are personal and private to men and excludes his wife. In “The Body,” the club in the treehouse is described in very similar terms.

The relationship in “Apt Pupil” takes the opposite arc. Todd and Dussander establish a standard of masculinity that degrades one another and results in fatal violence. Together, their relationship becomes symbiotic in the sense that they generate a new standard of morality for each other: Todd’s obsession with the horror of the World War II German concentration camps leads him to feed Dussander’s violent compulsions.

Rather than emphasizing individuality and self-sufficiency, King uses male friendships to explore masculinity that contains tenderness and camaraderie. His male characters seek intimacy—sometimes an unspoken intimacy—among themselves. In “Apt Pupil,” the lack of tenderness in Todd and Dussander’s bitter intimacy descends into violence.