56 pages • 1 hour read
Stephen KingJoyland
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2013A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Kite
The kite represents freedom, particularly freedom from the constraints of life. Mike describes flying his kite as a way of being able to fly himself. Devin thinks to himself that flying away would be especially important to a boy weighed down by a frail body. The subject of flight comes up again when Devin, Mike, and Annie are riding the Ferris wheel and Mike cries out that it is just like flying his kite. Finally, when Mike has died, Devin and Annie put some of his ashes in a pocket of the kite and fly it, allowing the ashes to trail out into the sky so that Mike, free of the weight of his body, is finally able to fly away as they let the kite go.
Professor Nako’s Office
The office of Professor George B. Nako is a tiny pocket of magic in the ordinary world, a nook with walls covered with fake diplomas and student papers on fanciful subjects. It represents a childhood fantasy shared and cherished by the student body. When Devin goes back as an adult, that little corner of childhood is gone, but there is consolation in that it remains forever preserved in memory and imagination.
Howie the Happy Hound
When one thinks of cartoon dogs, one typically thinks of companion dogs: Scooby Doo is a Great Dane, Snoopy is a beagle, Pluto is a playful mutt, and Goofy (well, nobody is exactly sure what Goofy is).
Howie, however, is a guardian dog, a German shepherd. He is fun and playful in the Wiggle-Waggle, but he symbolizes an overarching protection, which becomes evident when Devin saves Hallie from choking. Later, Devin plays the same role in a more complex form when he befriends Mike and his mother.
Through Howie, Devin relearns childhood not as a child himself but as the protector of it.
The Horror House and Linda Gray
The Horror House is a fairly straightforward representation of the underworld. It is dark and scary, has monsters painted on the front, and an invitation over the door to enter if one dares. If the symbolism isn’t clear enough, the ride is haunted at its deepest, darkest point by a gray lady, a ghostly queen of the underworld.
While the underworld is the land of the dead, it can also be a symbolic place of transition or transformation. In a certain kind of death story, the hero must descend into the underworld in search of something, or someone, he needs or wants—as Orpheus does when he enters hell to retrieve his lost Eurydice. Devin stays at the park in large part because he wants to see Linda in order to understand something he needs but can’t articulate. Devin is destined never to see Linda Gray directly. Mike is the one who frees her. Devin catches only a glimpse of her headband after she is gone. Linda isn’t the answer to Devin’s question. Mike is.
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