61 pages • 2 hours read
Gerald's Game
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Chapters 9-13Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 9 Summary
The child’s voice tells Jessie to go to sleep, but Ruth Neary’s voice urges her to wake up, accusing Jessie of always running away from trouble. Ruth asks what happened to Nora Callighan, Jessie’s therapist, and Jessie envisions a young girl in a pillory. She wonders what the girl did, and Ruth reveals that the girl was assaulted by a man shortly after menstruating for the first time. Jessie stopped seeing Nora because she felt uncomfortable answering questions about her childhood. Ruth notes that Jessie left the real Ruth for the same reason, as Ruth once wanted to know what happened to Jessie at Dark Score Lake when she started menstruating.
The voice of Ruth claims that she is Jessie’s only chance, and Jessie starts crying, having come close to thinking about what happened at Dark Score Lake when the “sun went out” (101). Jessie recalls going to a women’s consciousness group meeting with Ruth, at which a young woman revealed cigarette burns on her breasts from the abuse perpetrated by her brother and his friends. At the time, this revelation caused Jessie to run from the room. Ruth’s voice tells Jessie that she will need to confront her situation, and Jessie turns her attention to the glass of water that Gerald left on the shelf above the bed. Ruth’s voice suggests getting the water, and Goody suggests pressing one side of the shelf down to raise the other, in order to get the glass to slide into a position that Jessie can reach.
Jessie struggles with the shelf, wary of the dog in the entryway, and she remembers playing on seesaws with her sister, Maddy. She reminds herself that unlike a seesaw, the shelf is not fixed. She carefully pulls one end of the shelf down, and the glass slides along, but Jessie cannot get a grip on the glass. She personifies the glass, imagining it complaining that she wants so much from it. She finally manages to grasp the glass, but the chain prevents her from bringing the glass to her mouth. Both she and Ruth’s voice are livid. Goody tells Jessie to put the glass back on the shelf.
Chapter 10 Summary
Jessie feels ill with thirst and is reminded of a time as a child when she was sick with a fever. She had nightmares about what happened at Dark Score Lake, including smoky glass, “his hands,” and a smell like “minerals in well-water” (129). Goody’s voice tells her it is time to try to drink, and she reaches along the shelf to find a piece of thick paper. Jessie rolls the paper into a straw, but she is worried about the dog. Ruth’s voice tells her that she is good at “unhappening” things, referencing how Jessie told her that something happened at Dark Score Lake in 1963. In this incident, Jessie was alone with her father when the sun went out, and he did something to her. Ruth’s voice reveals that there was a total solar eclipse at Dark Score Lake in 1963, and Jessie asks why Ruth would bring up something distressing when she needs to focus on the water.
Jessie manages to grab the glass and use the straw to drink water. A voice in her head tells her to save some for later, but she continues to drink. Jessie puts the glass back and slumps a moment, feeling tired. She feels justified in her exhaustion after the success of the water, and she thinks about how she gave up teaching some years prior for tax reasons. Since then, she has had no real purpose or meaning in her life beyond working on self-improvement while avoiding her repressed trauma. She falls asleep, and Prince returns to bite off Gerald’s lower lip and cheek.
Chapter 11 Summary
In Jessie’s dream, the narrative flashes back to 1965. It is the ninth birthday of Jessie’s brother, Will, and the family has decided to return to their home in Portland, Maine, because Will wants to spend the day with his friends. They usually spend the summer at Dark Score Lake, but Jessie supports Will’s desire to come back to Portland, as she has begun to hate Dark Score Lake following the incident during the eclipse. Jessie’s mother, Sally, and her siblings, Maddy and Will, know that Jessie is the favorite of her father, Tom. Jessie continues to dream, and in this dream, she is getting ready to take her shot at croquet. She knows that her brother is about to “goose” her, and her friends turn into Nora Callighan and Ruth Neary, both of whom tell her that she will survive the “goosing.” Jessie tries to change the course of events, but she cannot move.
The dream shifts. An eclipse occurs as she feels a hand grab between her legs, but it is too large a hand to be Will’s. She turns around, expecting to see her father, revealing that her father assaulted her during the previous eclipse in 1963, but Gerald is there in his place, naked with handcuffs in his hands. Gerald is aroused, and he tells Jessie to put on the handcuffs, making a misogynistic comment. Jessie refuses to comply and realizes that she is also naked. All the party guests are now people she has known throughout her life. They are all looking at her, and they begin to laugh. Prince’s head comes out of Gerald’s mouth, then Jessie’s father’s head comes out of Prince, and he is singing Marvin Gaye’s “Can I Get a Witness.” Gerald gets one handcuff on Jessie, and she thinks that she is going to faint. The dream fades as she is awakened by a coughing sound.
Chapter 12 Summary
Prince is nervous in the house, though it is not Jessie’s moaning and talking in her sleep that scares him. Prince does not know what the threat is, but he flees to the woods near the house, rather than risk staying inside. Once in the woods, he inches back toward the house, knowing that the threat would have to be severe to keep him from eating more of Gerald’s corpse.
Chapter 13 Summary
Jessie comes out of her nightmare, noticing that she has wet the bed. She can hear Prince barking and tries to focus on her situation, ignoring the symbolism of the dream. She is paralyzed with fear when she sees a man standing in the corner of the room. The proportions of the man are unnatural, with too-long arms and a misshapen face, and she tries to convince herself that she is imagining him. However, Goody’s voice notes that Prince would not have left because of a hallucination, so the man must be real. Jessie and all her voices are scared, and Jessie notices that there is a chainsaw by the man’s feet, leading her to speculate that he has been cutting people all day, not trees. Jessie resolves that she cannot see clearly enough to determine what the object is, and she begins to beg the man to help her. He does not respond, and Jessie becomes incoherent with fear and begging.
Jessie becomes convinced that the figure is her father, Tom, even though Tom has been dead for 12 years. Jessie lets her legs fall apart, suggesting that Tom “go ahead” (182), so long as he unlocks her afterward. The figure does not respond, and Jessie accuses him of not being real. If he is real, Jessie says he does not have to unlock her, so long as he does not hurt her. He bows, revealing his disfigured face, and opens the object on the ground: a bag full of bones and jewelry. The man stirs the contents, which produce a terrible clacking and clinking sound. As the man pulls out a handful of bones and gold to show Jessie, she faints.
Chapters 9-13 Analysis
This section more fully explores Jessie’s childhood trauma, and although the exact details of that trauma are not yet described, the frequent oblique references establish the theme of The Lasting Effects of Unresolved Trauma: something with which Jessie will wrestle for the majority of the novel. For Jessie, her trauma is distinct from the trauma that the other women at the consciousness meeting experienced, and she believes her own trauma to be less relevant. This belief stems from her unresolved guilt in the aftermath of the trauma. As Ruth points out, part of Jessie’s mind wishes to remain “handcuffed, aching, thirsty, scared, and miserable” (137) because this is a kind of punishment for what Jessie sees as her role in her own abuse. In this way, King’s character reflects the attributes of many victims of abuse, who often see their trauma as a punishment for something that is inherently outside of their own control. In Jessie’s case, she was only 10 years old when the abuse occurred. She has repressed this trauma for so long that she is now struggling to engage her full faculties in order to escape the handcuffs.
The dream that Jessie has is relatively straightforward in imagery and content, as she revisits the birthday party at which she first lost control of her anger. At the birthday party, Jessie knows that Will is going to “goose” her, which is an inappropriate prank on its own, but the act of “goosing,” or poking someone in the rear, is also analogous to the assault that Tom perpetrated on her two years prior. This connection explains her anger, as Will is essentially lumped together with both Gerald and Tom in Jessie’s mind, for the act of goosing his sister is a reduction of the boundaries between himself and women. In the dream, as Will transforms into a nude and aroused Gerald, then Prince, and finally Tom, the cycle is completed, and King evokes the image of Prince as a representation of brutal, animal violence. This transformation reasserts the theme of Objectifying Women Through Toxic Masculinity, for the surreal imagery of Jessie’s dream merges these men into one composite villain while simultaneously revealing the metaphorical connection between Will’s goosing and Tom’s abuse.
The dynamic of toxic masculinity is later explored in the novel’s primary real-world setting as Jessie confuses the strange man in the bedroom with her father, even spreading her legs and telling him to “go ahead” so long as he agrees to unlock her. For Jessie, her experience with Tom has fueled her muddled perception of men as a monolithic group, and in her semi-rational state, this group’s amorphous boundaries expand to include not only Will and Gerald, but even the dog, Prince. Crucially, the people around Jessie at the dream-party slowly transform into various people from Jessie’s life, including Ruth Neary, Nora Callighan, and others. These transformations represent the lasting significance of Jessie’s embarrassment, as she has never been comfortable telling anyone about her abuse, not even Ruth and Nora. As she continues to keep this secret, the people that she keeps it from change from children to college peers, then to the professionals and other friends who populate her adult life. Throughout this time, she has only added more people whom she thinks would judge her or blame her for her own trauma.
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