51 pages • 1 hour read
Stephen King, Richard ChizmarGwendy's Button Box
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-8 Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Content Warning: This section contains references to suicide, mass suicide, suicidal ideation, child death, alcohol use disorder, violence, and sexual assault.
In 1974 in Castle Rock, Maine, Gwendy Peterson runs the Suicide Stairs, a tall flight of stairs that climbs up a hill, every day in the hopes she will lose weight before going to middle school. One day, a man named Richard Farris approaches her. She’s noticed Mr. Farris sitting there before, but this is the first day he has spoken to her. Gwendy hesitates to talk to Mr. Farris since she doesn’t know him, but the two engage in small talk before Gwendy explains she needs to go.
Mr. Farris tells Gwendy he’s been watching her and knows that someone has made her self-conscious about her weight. She agrees, explaining that Frankie Stone nicknamed her “Goodyear.” Mr. Farris applauds her for her initiative and then tells her he has a gift for her because she is young and seems responsible. Gwendy asks if Mr. Farris wants to hurt her, but he promises he doesn’t.
Mr. Farris instead brings out a canvas bag. In the canvas bag is a wooden box. Gwendy immediately wants the box, and, when she asks Mr. Farris what it is, he tells her it’s her “button box.” On the top of the box are eight buttons: light green, dark green, yellow, orange, blue, violet, red, and black. There is a small lever at both ends of the box and a slot in the middle.
Mr. Farris tells her that it is difficult to push the buttons. He explains that the left lever dispenses chocolates in the shape of animals. These chocolates will make Gwendy not overeat. Gwendy tries one of the chocolates and is overwhelmed by the flavor, but finds herself satisfied. The other lever dispenses a very valuable Morgan silver dollar when she pulls it. Gwendy tries to give the coin back to Mr. Farris but he refuses, telling her it’s hers and she will earn it eventually.
Mr. Farris explains that each button correlates with a continent: Asia (light green), Africa (dark green), Europe (orange), Australia (yellow), North America (blue), and South America (violet). The red button is whatever Gwendy wants it to be and the black button encompasses everything. The red button can be used multiple times. He tells her that she must take care of the button box and not let anyone discover it because it could have dire effects on the world.
Before he leaves, Mr. Farris asks why the stairs are called the Suicide Steps. Gwendy tells him that multiple people have jumped to their deaths on the stairs. Gwendy asks him what will happen if she pushes the buttons, but Mr. Farris tells her there’s no reason to ask him a question she already knows the answer to. Mr. Farris leaves, disappearing halfway down the hill.
The chapter ends with a picture of the Suicide Steps and Mr. Farris’s hat tumbling down the cliffside.
Chapter 2 Summary
Gwendy returns home, trying to decide on a place to hide the button box that her parents won’t find. She decides to hide it in a nook in an oak tree in the backyard.
That night at dinner, her father offers her a slice of cake, but she refuses. The next morning after a healthy breakfast and a run up the Suicide Steps, Gwendy retrieves the box. She eats one chocolate and finds herself satisfied for the rest of the day. After spending the day with her friend Olive, she pulls out the box again and pulls the lever, hoping for another silver dollar, but nothing comes out.
The Petersons spend the weekend away from home, and Gwendy feels anxious about the possibility of someone stealing the button box and relieved when she returns home to find it undisturbed. Her father comes outside and offers to push her on the swing, but she declines, telling him she’s too old for that now.
Chapter 3 Summary
Gwendy receives another chocolate and an 1891 silver dollar from the box. She realizes that people will have a lot of questions about how she got this money and even more about the button box itself. She contemplates the buttons again before going to her best friend Olive’s house to hang out.
Chapter 4 Summary
When Gwendy goes to middle school, she realizes it’s not as bad as she expected it to be. She no longer gets called Goodyear, and she becomes a talented soccer player and track runner.
Her new seventh-grade history teacher, Miss Chiles, hosts a Curiosity Day, where every student is required to choose one historical concept about which they are curious. Miss Chiles will try to answer their questions herself, but if she cannot, she’ll allow the class to discuss it.
When it’s Gwendy’s turn to ask a question, she poses a hypothetical: If you had a magic button that you could push and kill any person or destroy any place, what person or place would you harm? Miss Chiles says that killing or destroying is not okay, and the students then discuss the effect the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had on civilians.
At the end of the day, Miss Chiles thanks Gwendy for her question, telling her that it was the best question of the day and that she’s glad that no button like that exists. Gwendy argues that buttons like this do exist, citing Nixon and Brezhnev.
Chapter 5 Summary
Gwendy discovers she no longer needs to wear her glasses, but her mother assumes she’s refusing to wear her glasses so boys will be more interested in her. Her mother takes her to the optometrist who confirms her eyesight has improved. He tells her she must have been eating a lot of carrots, and Gwendy thinks to herself that she’s been eating a lot of chocolates from the button box.
The chapter ends with an image of a Raggedy Ann doll sitting up against a counter. On the counter, is a pair of glasses.
Chapter 6 Summary
As Gwendy goes about her daily life, she constantly worries about someone stealing the button box. Her life continues to improve, and she becomes very beautiful, remaining keenly aware that her good fortune is due to the button box. Soon she has her first kiss with a boy named Henry. Later that night she has a dream about Henry holding the button box. In the dream, she tells him not to push any of the buttons, but he pushes the black one, claiming it is the “Cancer” button. Soon the sky turns black and the ground starts shaking, which leads Gwendy to believe that the world is being destroyed. When she wakes up, she reminds herself it was just a dream.
The next day, she relocates the button box to a hole in the wall of the basement and moves a bureau in front of it to hide it.
Chapter 7 Summary
Gwendy, now a sophomore in high school, continues to become more and more beautiful. Additionally, other aspects of her life have improved. Her parents’ relationship is better than ever, and they are no longer misusing alcohol. When Gwendy asks her mother if her father attends Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), she says he doesn’t, and they never discussed stopping drinking together. Gwendy attributes this newfound marital and domestic peace to the button box.
Chapter 8 Summary
One night, Gwendy goes to take out the trash and sees Frankie Stone. He asks her to go out with him, but Gwendy refuses since Frankie is unattractive and is rumored to have sexually assaulted someone. He gets angry and cusses her out, calling her Goodyear again. Gwendy cries as she runs into the house.
That night, Gwendy dreams of Frankie Stone. In the dream, she attacks Frankie in his car, telling him he should never have been mean to “the Queen of the Button Box” (55). When she wakes up, she smiles at the dream but doesn’t think about it again. Two weeks later, on the third anniversary of the day she received the button box, her father tells her that Frankie is in the newspaper because he got in a bad car accident. The injuries line up with what she dreamed.
Chapters 1-8 Analysis
King and Chizmar introduce the recurring motif of Mr. Farris’s hat in this first section of the novella to emphasize the novella’s thematic interest in The Weight and Isolation of Secrets. When Mr. Farris gives Gwendy the button box, he goes to great lengths to ensure she understands she cannot tell anyone she has it. Gwendy understands and complies, hiding the button box first in a tree in her backyard and then in the basement. However, the constant fear of someone finding the button box leaves Gwendy anxious and paranoid and increases her level of loneliness.
During Gwendy’s initial meeting with Mr. Farris, he foreshadows the pain the button box will cause her, alluding to The Murky Line Between Selfishness and Selflessness, one of the novel’s central themes. Mr. Farris tells Gwendy: “you will want it, the owner of the box always does. It’s normal. Wanting to know things and do things is what the human race is all about. Exploration, Gwendy! Both the disease and the cure” (14). Mr. Farris’s description of curiosity—and using the button box’s power—as “Both the disease and the cure” points to the morally complex nature of power and foreshadows the many times throughout the novella that Gwendy’s motives are muddled (14).
King and Chizmar anchor each of their chapters with a key image, highlighting central motifs and themes. The first image that appears in this section of the novella is an image of the rickety stairs of the Suicide Steps with Mr. Farris’s hat seen falling down the cliffside. At the top of the cliff, a female figure stands. The illustrator uses dark shadowing and coloring, conveying a bleak and foreboding tone. The image emphasizes the treacherous and unstable construction of the Suicide Steps, suggesting that Gwendy’s newfound success with the button box—which she receives at the top of the Steps—is built on shaky ground, and underscoring the motif of the Suicide Steps as representative of the perilous nature of navigating prescribed social standards of beauty and popularity in adolescence.
The second image in this section of the novella is of a Raggedy Ann doll propped against a counter with a pair of oversized glasses. This image highlights the coming-of-age arc that King and Chizmar establish for Gwendy. She’s quickly growing up and maturing, moving past the need for childish things, like her doll or her tire swing in the backyard. With the help of the button box's chocolates, Gwendy no longer needs glasses, pointing to the arbitrary nature of social privilege and popularity. The authors employ the stereotypical association of poor eyesight with low social standing to highlight the ways the button box allows Gwendy to leave both her childhood toys and her social hang-ups behind.
King and Chizmar evoke the socio-political context of the Cold War, creating an analogy between the power Gwendy wields as the guardian of the button box to push a button and cause the destruction of unknown people and places with the threat of global nuclear war. In the Curiosity Day scene, Gwendy asks her class who, what, or where they would choose if they had a magical button that had the power to destroy that person, place, or thing. The authors employ dramatic irony in her teacher's response, musing that she’s thankful no such button exists. Gwendy quickly corrects her, making the comparison between the button box and the nuclear threat of the Cold War era explicit:
‘But there is,’ Gwendy says. ‘Nixon has one. So does Brezhnev. Some other people, too.’ Having given Miss Chiles this lesson—not in history, but in current events—Gwendy rides away on a bike that is rapidly becoming too small for her (35).
Adding this historical layer of socio-political anxiety by alluding to the specter of a destructive button foreshadows the button box’s dark potential—a potential of which only Gwendy is aware, contributing to The Weight of Isolation and Secrets.
Throughout the novella, King and Chizmar use Gwendy’s dreams both to foretell events to come and to reveal Gwendy’s subconscious desires. The connection between Gwendy’s subconscious dreamscape and reality further nuances the novella’s thematic exploration of Fate Versus Free Will. Her dream about her main antagonist, Frankie Stone, comes true:
In the dream, she doesn’t stand there helpless in the driveway with her heart in her throat. In the dream, she rushes at Frankie, and before he can peel out, she lunges through the open driver’s window and grabs his left arm. She twists until she hears—and feels—the bones snapping beneath her hands. And as he screams, she says, How’s that boner now, Frankie Stoner? More like two inches than two feet, I bet. You never should have fucked with the Queen of the Button Box (55).
It’s in her dream that Gwendy first claims the power of the button box as her own, calling herself “the Queen of the Button Box” (55). By fully accepting the button box’s potential for destruction and power, Gwendy reaps the full benefits, which include the ability to harm Frankie. The clairvoyant nature of the dream, however, suggests that claiming the box’s power is an inevitability for Gwendy and not a choice made through free will.
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