If It Bleeds

“When you grew up in a no-stoplight, dirt-road town like Harlow, the outside world was a strange and tempting place, and you longed to touch it in a way network TV couldn’t match. At least I did. All these things were at your fingertips, courtesy of AT&T and Steve Jobs.”

In this passage, Stephen King characterizes the setting of his novella as a small town isolated from the wider world, and he uses the first-person perspective of the narrator to draw out the protagonist’s feelings about the world around him. This illuminates Craig’s reasons for wanting to get an iPhone as soon as it is announced.

“‘What about you, Craig?’ Dad murmured. ‘Want a last look, or are you good?’

I wanted more than that, but I couldn’t tell him. The same way I couldn’t tell him how bad I felt. It had come home to me now. It didn’t happen while I was reading the scripture, as I’d read so many other things for him, but while I was sitting and looking at his nose sticking up. Realizing that his coffin was a ship, and it was going to take him on his final voyage. One that went down into the dark. I wanted to cry, and I did cry, but later, in private. I sure didn’t want to do it here, among strangers.

‘Yes, but I want to be at the end of the line. I want to be last.’”

At Mr. Harrigan’s funeral, Craig realizes the intimacy of his friendship with the old tycoon. His reluctance to share how he really feels with his father foreshadows his later decision to share Kenny Yanko’s bullying with Mr. Harrigan, but not with his father and the other adults around him.

“Children believe their entire worlds revolve around them. That sense of being at the center of everything usually starts to fade by the time you’re twenty or so, but you’re a long way from that.”

In this passage, Ms. Hargensen delivers a crucial insight that resonates with the narrative frame around the novella. Because the story is being narrated by an adult Craig looking back on his childhood, the inclusion of this observation points to Craig’s understanding of his limited perspective as a child. This implies that as an adult narrator, Craig has grown out of the perspective that Ms. Hargensen describes.