53 pages • 1 hour read
Billy Summers
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Symbols & Motifs
The Baby Shoe and Other Good Luck Charms
Content Warning: This section references violence, including the murder of a child.
Billy Summers is full of good luck charms—objects that seem to have a magical significance for the characters who keep them. Billy in particular carries several talismans at different times. There is an extended discussion on the magic of charms and talismans in which the narrator explains that Billy “doesn’t want to lose the lappie any more than he wants to lose the copy of Thérèse Raquin he was reading when he came to this city […] Lucky charms are what they are […] the object matters” (143). They matter because they are tokens that stave off misfortune; keeping them implies a belief in a volatile universe but also, contradictorily, an ability to exert control. One object that illustrates this tension is the baby shoe Billy found on the ground after a mission in Fallujah in which he killed a local shopkeeper. Stooping to pick up the shoe from the ground saved his life, taking him out of the way of a bullet, and the shoe becomes both a talisman and the subject of frequent meditation: “His mind […] sideslips back to Fallujah and the baby shoe” (152). He keeps the shoe with him until just before the Funhouse incident, when he realizes that it is missing. Losing the shoe and the disaster that follows become tied together in his memory.
This motif of objects that are lucky or unlucky raises questions about determinism. At different times, characters make contrary claims about whether life is random or preordained. When Alice says, “[E]verything happens for a reason,” Billy angrily disagrees because that implies that there is “something up the line more important than [his] sister” (285). However, a moment later he agrees with her that the natural beauty of the Rocky Mountains might point to a benevolent God. Elsewhere Billy references God but associates him with chance, saying, “God doesn’t have a plan, He throws pickup sticks” (305). Later still he notes that “Johnny Capps was the first link in the chain” leading to his meeting with Alice (321), implying a necessary sequence of events. The plot itself seems to imply that the present is fundamentally shaped and determined by the past. Late in the novel, Billy has the “omenish” thought that he “was always coming” to Promontory Point, which is almost dismissed as “pretentious” but then affirmed a moment later in the authoritative voice of the narrator: “He was always coming here. Yes” (337).
The Scorpion and the Frog
When Billy’s sister is killed by his mother’s boyfriend (whom Billy then shoots), there is a hearing about the circumstances that led to those events. An unnamed man on the panel of this hearing tells a story about a scorpion that wants to cross a “raging river” and begs a ride from “a kind-hearted frog” (96). The scorpion stings the frog when they are halfway across the river. The frog asks the scorpion why he would sting him when it means that now they will both drown. The scorpion replies that it was his nature to sting and that the frog should take responsibility for allowing him onto his back in the first place. The man on the panel tells Billy’s mother, “[T]he man you picked up was a scorpion […] and he stung your little girl to death” (96), reprimanding her that she must “shoulder some of the blame for this tragedy” (96). Billy’s mother’s retorts that such moralizing overlooks the realities of her life: “[Y]ou are so unfair, sitting there on your high horse. When was the last time you had to do 40 hours of sweat-labor to bring home groceries?” (97).
The story and the argument surrounding it thus symbolize the complexity of assigning blame—whether people are born bad or made bad, and whether those who allow evil to occur are as culpable as those who commit wicked actions or those who stand by and allow it to happen. Significantly, it takes the form of a story within a story, implying that there is a didactic function to the telling of tales, which touches on questions of the value or purpose of literary representation raised elsewhere in the novel. The question of whether doing bad deeds makes someone bad is likewise revisited throughout the novel. When Billy sees himself discussed on the TV news after the shooting, he notes that they don’t go into detail about his heroic actions in Iraq: “He’s the villain of the piece, so why muddle things up?” (199). Similarly, at the end of the novel, Billy tells Alice that both he and Bucky are “bad guys.” By this point, however, King has firmly established Billy and Bucky’s moral complexity, prompting the reader to realize this is a deliberately simplistic statement.
The Good Samaritan
The novel mentions the figure of the Good Samaritan on more than one occasion. For example, when wondering whether to take Alice in himself (and in doing so, become a Good Samaritan who finds someone wounded on the road), Billy thinks: “[T]hey [passersby] might not stop, good Samaritans are always in short supply” (205). This chimes with the idea of “gray people” being the majority, which Billy’s “child self” discovered. As Billy writes about his discovery of moral complexity while in foster care: there “aren’t just 2 kinds of people, good and bad […] There are 3. The third type of people go along to get along […] Those are the most people in the world and I think they are gray people. They will not hurt you (at least on purpose) but they won’t help you much either” (101). This particular evil—an evil of carelessness and omission—is the target of the biblical story of the Good Samaritan, in which supposedly good people walk past a wounded traveler until the despised Samaritan comes by and helps him.
The most developed episode using this image occurs when Billy decides not to save a lone female shopworker from an armed robbery because it would put him at risk. He justifies this to himself by noting that “it could have been a lot worse” and would have “gone down much as it did” even if he had called 911 (113). Nevertheless, he says, that “doesn’t change the fact that he feels like the priest and Levite who passed by on the other side of the road before a good Samaritan came along and saved the day” (113). This sense of responsibility becomes central to Billy’s character and a justification for his vigilante actions later in the novel.
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By Stephen King
