Different Seasons

The only description that Red gives of himself in “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption” is when he speaks about looking into a mirror and recollecting that he once had bright red hair, which is now gray. For the rest of the time, he talks about himself in the context of his crime. He regrets the murders and he believes that his life sentence is fair. He also describes himself as being tormented by remorse when he first came to Shawshank, a point that initiates his character development via the titular redemption.

However, Red says that he doesn’t know what rehabilitation really means, so he doesn’t know if he could be called “rehabilitated.” He is resigned to spending the rest of his life in prison. When Andy asks him whether he doesn’t want to get out, Red replies that he wouldn’t know how to live outside anymore. Red sees little value in himself. King explores injustices in America throughout Different Seasons, and Red’s lack of self-worth allows him to explore socioeconomic injustice. He committed the original crime because he saw himself as inferior to his wife and her family who are wealthy; he contrasts himself as an uneducated, working-class kid. Being the “getter” at Shawshank is more status and control than Red ever had outside.

King compares Andy and Red as redeemer and disciple, respectively. They were charged with similar crimes—both convicted of killing their wives—but Andy is one of only a few innocent men in the prison and Red is one of the few who admits to his guilt. Red is awed by the patience, perseverance, and sheer determination necessary for Andy to have forced his way through the sewer. In contrast, when Red is paroled, he is so overwhelmed by the lack of walls, fences, and rules that he considers committing another crime just to get back where he feels safe and in control, exemplifying the cycle of crime and punishment. However, Andy offers Red the same kind of help on the outside that Red gave him in prison: a chance for a new life. Red’s story illuminates the motif of hope in Different Seasons.

On the surface, Todd is the perfect American boy in the context of patriarchal and racist hierarchies that King explores in “Apt Pupil”: white, blond, athletic, smiling, polite. Underneath, he has morbid fascinations and murderous intentions. He has cordial but distant relationships with his parents. He wears a sunny smile, aware of its power to manipulate. He has no intimate ties to anyone, nor does he want them. His relationship to Arthur Denker/Kurt Dussander is the most intimate of his life and is based on power; King hence explores the dark side of male friendship through Todd.

Todd exists in a home environment with superficial values, and his attempts to appear innocent and hide what is underneath reflects this. King mirrors Todd’s attempts to project good appearances when he changes his report card and helps Dussander to bury a victim. Todd, however, identifies with Dussander and his crimes to a visceral extent.

Having been a commandant of a concentration camp, the reader learns at the beginning of “Apt Pupil” that Kurt Dussander has become Arthur Denker, a retired butcher, an occupation through which King employs gallows humor. Kurt Dussander does not regret his role at the camp during the war. He feels some moral ambiguity, aware that his actions are now considered to be the epitome of evil and that he should avoid admitting to them. However, he doesn’t exhibit the sadistic thrill that Todd experiences when thinking about his crimes and remembers some episodes with dismay.

At first he is uncomfortable talking about the worst atrocities, but comes to appreciate telling them to someone. Dussander is hence once of the many storytellers in Different Seasons, and King uses stories-within-the-stories in order to obliquely explore the emotions of the characters, including Dussander’s feelings about the nature of evil and Free Will and Existentialism.

Dussander initially resents Todd’s power over him. When Todd buys him the SS uniform, he begs Todd not to make him wear it. When he finally puts it on, he becomes an automaton and marches at Todd’s orders, making him a figure that invokes traditional features of horror stories. Eventually, Dussander turns the tables and gains some power over Todd. When Todd starts spending less time with Dussander, Dussander feels the addiction to power overwhelm him. He resists out of fear of discovery, but eventually, the need for power drives him to murder—first of animals, then human beings who he believes won’t be missed. Power is the reason that Dussander eventually dies by suicide. He knows what will happen to him, and he uses the final action to cheat the Israeli Nazi hunters of legal justice or vengeance.

Gordie is the protagonist and narrator of “The Body.” Although he tells his story as an adult, he and his friends are 12, at the end of junior high and about to enter high school, the last sprint before adulthood. Gordie’s false belief is that he is invisible and insignificant, especially to his parents and especially after the death of his older brother, whom his parents adored. Gordie knows that his parents not-so-secretly wish it had been Gordie—the unwanted younger son—who had died instead. Gordie craves a sense of significance. King uses the quest story structure of medieval chivalric romance to reflect this: The quest to view the body is his chance to escape his brother’s shadow.

Unlike traditional knight figures, Gordie is skinny and physically unremarkable. However, he is intelligent and creative and good at school. His teachers expect him to go to college and do well, unlike his friends. This sense of a future for Gordie is reflected in the framing device of him retelling his childhood from an older age.

While Chris is not the protagonist of “The Body,” King ironically gives him the qualities of a protagonist in a quest narrative: He embodies the chivalric ideal of manhood. Chris combines strength, courage, compassion, and sensitivity. He tends to the other boys’ emotional wounds in a way that Gordie doesn’t or can’t. His desire to study law reflects a desire to bring justice to the world and to people like himself who have been kept down by an unjust world. Even his death is a (failed) attempt to protect his murderer from making a terrible mistake. In the end, the world’s evil is too big for Chris to heal, but he devotes his short life to trying.

Chris believes that he can never escape Castle Rock and never amount to anything because he is surrounded by people who drag or push him down. The teacher who betrayed him by keeping the money he tried to return embodies the whole town and this small scenario represents wider economic injustices that King approaches throughout Different Seasons. When Chris finally breaks down, expressing all his hurt and vulnerability to Gordie, he empowers Gordie to devote himself to lifting Chris up; their relationship embodies The Importance of Male Friendship. In doing so, Chris’s function is to make Gordie feel visible in a way that he has never been visible to his family.

Where Gordon and Chris are the strongest members of the group in “The Body,” Teddy and Vern are more vulnerable. Teddy has severely-burned ears and wears hearing aids due to an injury inflicted by his father who has a mental illness. Teddy is nevertheless intensely proud of his father. Teddy is emotionally volatile, easily triggered to rage if his father is criticized. He is reckless and compelled to tests of daring in which he faces death such as standing in the road in front of oncoming trucks and leaping aside just in time to avoid being hit. He never refuses a dare. Teddy’s daring in the face of trains and Milo Pressman heightens the sense of bathos when the most genuine obstacle of the quest is the most prosaic: the shop keeper. His tears after he is taunted by Milo become a challenge of the quest in itself; the boys struggle to know what to do, but Chris, the knight figure, comforts him, suggesting that the boys’ quest is both emotional and literal.

Vern Tessio isn’t the smartest of the boys, and he contributes the least to the group dynamics, but when Teddy apologizes for spoiling everybody else’s good time, Vern is the one who articulates the seriousness of the quest. He tells them that it isn’t supposed to be fun, reinforcing the sense that the quest is also one of emotions. They are doing something serious, and it should be terrifying. None of the other boys had recognized that until Vern says it. King uses Vern to crystalize the sense of profundity in a chivalric romance.

Teddy and Vern fail at the end of the quest by running away, but they grow enough that they can slip out of Chris’s shadow, setting him free to fight his way out of Castle Rock. Chris regards them as obstacles in his own journey. They become the kings of their own little world, dominating younger kids; this sense of the insularity of their lives and their lack of development is reinforced by their premature deaths.

David Adley is the narrator and protagonist of the frame story of “The Breathing Method” that brackets Emlyn McCarron’s story about Sandra Stansfield. David is middle-aged, married, childless, and ordinary in every way. At his law firm, he is a mid-level employee who never expects to be a partner, and he is both resigned and reasonably content. Despite that, he still feels a dissatisfaction that he barely recognizes. King ascribes much of this dissatisfaction to his sense of masculinity in a patriarchal society and his lack of male friendship. George Waterhouse, the head of David’s firm, recognizes that although, David is not a go-getter, he is an unfulfilled dreamer who would fit into the enigmatic club.

David desires something even just a little wonderful in his life. After he finds the club, the duality of his life is that two contradictory things—his mundane, mediocre job and his secret, magical retreat—can exist in him at the same time. The motif of the telling of stories in “The Breathing Method” reflects the embedding of wonder into the everyday.

In “The Breathing Method”, Emlyn, the doctor who recounts the story of Sandra Stansfield, is another first-person narrator. His role is primarily to juxtapose a male homosocial world with Sandra’s lone struggles. He has a near-reverence for pregnancy and childbirth and describes the process with awe as a powerful engine, unstoppable once it starts. In the end, he is helpless to do anything but watch as Sandra transcends death to bring life into the world. His helplessness to initiate change and save Sandra—antithetical to the ideals of chivalric masculinity—is reinforced by the fact that he later realizes that titular breathing method that he espouses inadvertently contributed to her death by spooking the taxi driver.