The timing of events in this novel was crucial to keeping it suspenseful. Stephen King dropped subtle hints throughout the novel about time, but it wasn't until I read the novel the second time that I picked up on those hints. For example, I never even noticed that when Stephen King introduced the Lot, every chapter started with a different hour of the day. For example, at 5:00 p.m. Matt Burke left the high school and at 7:30 p.m. that same night, Marjorie Glick saw her sons for the last time.
I can't ignore the fact that Ben Mears showed up in town around the same time that Straker and Barlow did either. That timing caused a lot of suspicion and gave Ben Mears a bad reputation right off the bat. At one point, Ben Mears mentioned to Susan Norton that the town had the wrong name and that it should have been named Time.
The most obvious use of time was in the end when Ben Mears and Mark Petrie were racing the clock to get a stake in Barlow's heart before sunset came at exactly 6:55 p.m. Stephen King's used of time really made the ending suspenseful and it really brought another thought to mind.
I find that it was really ironic that time was so prevalent in the novel because in actuality, time meant nothing to vampires. Vampires lived such long lives that time must not even matter to them. I think Stephen King might have been playing off of that idea and pointing out that time meanr everything to humans in this story and yet it had no meaning for the vampires.
No comments:
Post a Comment