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 9-16Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 9 Summary
Before Gwendy starts her sophomore year, she decides to run the Suicide Steps. As she runs, she contemplates the role of the button box in her life, wondering how much of her life is controlled by the box versus her own actions.
Chapter 10 Summary
Gwendy’s sophomore year begins well: She’s elected class president and captain of the junior varsity (JV) soccer team and a popular and attractive senior football player asks her to the homecoming dance. She continues to eat the chocolates from the button box but doesn’t pull the lever for more coins as often as she used to. She had one of the silver dollars appraised, and a man offered her $750 for it. When she left the shop, she thought she saw Mr. Farris smiling at her.
Gwendy decides she needs to learn the truth about what the buttons do, so she goes to her history teacher’s empty classroom to look at world geography maps. After examining the maps and contemplating various factors such as population and quality of life, she decides South America will be the target.
Back home, she pulls out the button box and then imagines South America, focusing on an image of a sparsely populated jungle. She pushes the red button, but nothing happens. Then she remembers that Mr. Farris warned her that it was difficult to push down the buttons and she needed to use her thumb. She pushes the button again and is successful. As she puts the box away, her face feels feverish, and she has a stomach ache, prompting her to wonder if the box is working.
Chapter 11 Summary
The next morning, Gwendy wakes up with a fever and sleeps most of the day. When she wakes up, she watches the evening news about the Jonestown Massacre in Guyana in horror, feeling especially shocked by the death of the children.
Gwendy decides she needs to go for a run and considers going to the Suicide Steps, but decides against it, fearing she’ll attempt to die by suicide. Instead, she runs around the neighborhood, reckoning with the idea that she’s responsible for the dead children of Jonestown.
The chapter ends with an image of a TV displaying an ABC News report on Jonestown.
Chapter 12 Summary
Olive comes over upset, wanting to discuss her issues and accusing Gwendy of ignoring her. She says that Gwendy doesn’t want to be seen with her because Gwendy has new, cooler best friends. Eventually, Gwendy realizes Olive is upset because Gwendy went out with a boy Olive likes. Gwendy apologizes to Olive and offers to set her up with the boy, but Olive refuses, offended by Gwendy’s “charity.” As Olive leaves, she accuses Gwendy of being selfish, which infuriates Gwendy. Gwendy begins to cry, trying to convince herself that she’s not selfish and that the Jonestown Massacre wasn’t her fault.
Chapter 13 Summary
The next day at school, Gwendy tries to make up with Olive, but Olive ignores her. She goes on a date later that night and drinks to make herself feel better. Gwendy and her date go to an arcade and see Olive there with some girls from a neighboring high school. Someone bumps into Olive, causing her to spill soda all over herself. Embarrassed, Olive looks at Gwendy before running away. Gwendy thinks of the dream she had about Frankie and wants to go home.
Chapter 14 Summary
The day before prom, the Peterson’s basement floods. Gwendy immediately goes down to retrieve the button box, which falls into the water when she tries to move it from its place in the wall. She reaches into the dirty water, trying to recover the box, becoming increasingly anxious as she struggles. At last, she finds it and dries it off quickly.
Taking the box up to her room, she checks it to make sure it still works and is relieved when it dispenses chocolate. She decides to hide it in her closet in an old boot box. For the rest of the day, she continuously checks for the box, and she wonders if this is how she’ll spend the rest of her life.
Chapter 15 Summary
The chapter begins with an image of a store window that has a sign advertising an upcoming Coin and Stamp Show.
Gwendy sees a sign for an upcoming coin and stamp show and wonders if she should sell some of her silver dollars. She wants to attend an Ivy League college and knows she’ll need money to pay for tuition. She has at least 100 silver dollars, and, from her research, she knows the value of the silver dollar is only going up. After seeing the sign, she plans to take two silver dollars to the show and see how much money she can get for them.
Chapter 16 Summary
Gwendy walks into the coin and stamp show, surprised that it’s such a large event. The sellers are mostly men, and she catches many of them checking her out as she walks around. She finally spots a Morgan silver dollar on one of the tables and approaches the older seller. He does not check her out, which she appreciates. The man introduces himself as John Leonard (Lenny). Gwendy tells him about her coins and shows them, telling him she got them from her deceased grandfather. As Lenny looks at the coins, he asks her if her parents know she’s selling the coins, and she says they do and support her selling them to pay for her Ivy League education. He tells her that he’s not sure how much the coins will go for because they are in such pristine condition. Gwendy asks Lenny if he would give her $800 for them, which would make them “Priced to sell.” He agrees and gives her money in cash. Lenny walks her out of the store and wishes her luck.
Chapters 9-16 Analysis
The grainy image of the ABC News coverage of the Jonestown Massacre that opens this section of the novella raises the dramatic stakes for Gwendy, suggesting real and tragic consequences for her experiments with the button box. The illustrator depicts the news footage as an aerial shot, both emphasizing the sheer scale of the massacre and making it impossible for the reader to see any of the dead bodies up close. By presenting the image through a television screen, the illustrator allows the reader to experience it as the protagonist does when she watches the evening news, further highlighting Gwendy’s physical and psychological removal from the actual events happening in Guyana.
King and Chizmar use the juxtaposition of this emotional distance with the scope and horror of the tragedy to catalyze Gwendy’s obsession with The Murky Line Between Selfishness and Selflessness. When Gwendy and Olive fight, Olive accuses her friend of becoming selfish, which infuriates and deeply wounds Gwendy. She is especially sensitive to being called “selfish” because of her increasing guilt and fear surrounding the Jonestown Massacre. Gwendy insists,
I think about others. I try to be a good person. I made a mistake about Guyana, but I was…I was tricked into it, and I wasn’t the one who poisoned them. It wasn’t me.’ Except it sort of was. Gwendy cries herself to sleep and dreams of nurses bearing syringes of Kool-Aid death to small children (71).
Gwendy feels a deep internal conflict about her involvement in the Jonestown Massacre—while she didn’t intend to hurt anyone, it was her selfish curiosity that encouraged her to press the red button in the first place.
The privileged lens through which Gwendy arrives at her decision of which location to choose for her button box experiment emphasizes her immaturity and ignorance of that privilege early in her arc:
She […] carefully studies the map, focusing first on Australia (where, she recently learned, over one-third of the country is desert) before moving on to Africa (those poor folks have enough problems) and finally settling on South America […] Gwendy remembers two important facts that aid this decision: South America harbors thirty-five of the fifty least-developed countries in the world, and a similar percentage of the least-populated countries in the world (62).
Gwendy believes her choice to be selfless, reflecting a desire to cause the least harm possible. She relies on statistics to dehumanize the situation, reinforcing King and Chizmar’s analogy to nuclear warfare. In her quest to determine the perfect location to test the button box’s power, Gwendy reveals her own privileged perspective.
The motif of Mr. Farris’s hat in this section adds to the paranoia Gwendy feels brought on by The Weight and Isolation of Secrets. As she leaves the coin and stamp show, Gwendy sees “a man looking at her from across the street, a man wearing a neat little black hat. Farris—if it was Farris—[gives] her a fleeting smile and disappear[s] around the corner” (61). The appearance of the hat—and Mr. Farris’s smile—serve as a reminder to Gwendy that her good fortune carries with it the burden of secrecy.
The bullying Olive experiences causes Gwendy to question the degree to which she is responsible for her friend’s suffering—and by extension, the suffering of those in faraway countries that she has never met—highlighting the novella’s exploration of Fate Versus Free Will. Gwendy feels hurt that Olive begrudges her the good fortune of the button box—hurt that gives rise to unkind thoughts about Olive. When Olive suffers an embarrassing incident at the arcade just after their fight, she stares at Gwendy before running off. In this moment, Gwendy’s mind makes a connection between the bullying Olive experiences and the way in which her dreams of revenge against Frankie became a reality, indicating her fear that her hurt over Olive’s resentment caused the humiliating incident, further raising the narrative stakes: “Gwendy, remembering her dream about Frankie Stone, suddenly wants to go home and shut the door of her room and crawl under the covers” (74). This scene marks the last time Olive is seen alive in the text.
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