Can Almost Reach: An Inquiry on Craft
A regional piece of New England fiction,
Steven King’s short story “The Reach,” chronicles the trying times of the
longstanding and somewhat isolated island community of Goat Island, Maine as it
weathers through, in a very literal fashion, the mundane of the everyday and
the mendacity required to discover worth in the embrace of so limited, so
antiquated, a means of existence. Comparable
to the themes apparent in his predecessor, Jack London’s “To Build a Fire,” the
conflict within “The Reach,” and the introspective tone King uses to bring that
conflict to climax, is one less concerned with the inherent struggle of Man vs.
Nature than it is with the eternal “conflict within”— Man vs. Self or Man vs.
His Own Nature; the stories protagonist, Stella Flanders, has been, for nearly
a century it would seem, her own most obdurate oppressor. Through a series of zooming outs, King’s
omniscient narrator expands upon the cloistered world, the arguably
fear-stunted life, of Stella Flanders; compelling the reader to follow her through
the quaint rural-Gothicism of her final year, until she’s brave enough to cross the Reach.
The employ of third person
narration is useful in not only observing setting and pacing the story— the
passing of time, decline of Stella’s health and so forth— but also in providing
for the reader a glimpse into the thoughts, feelings and, most importantly, the
memories of Stella herself. In the first
passage of “The Reach”, a family conversation written as external analepsis, setting;
“the last summer of her [Stella’s] life…Goat Island” and plot; “the summer
before she started seeing ghosts” are established right away (709). Through a verisimilitude of plain description—the
naming of the months and use of their associated sensual experiences— the
loading of Chekov’s Gun (use of event-driven foreshadowing on the part of the
narrator) and passages of somewhat dialectic dialogue, the reader immediately
becomes aware that Stella is passing through her last year and by the end of
the story will be dead, having encountered the supernatural before her time is
up (709-711). Furthermore, thematic elements
such as the impact of age on memory, or perhaps more accurately the significance
of memory to the aged, are revealed through the use of this and subsequent dialogue
between Stella and her grandchildren: “The
Reach was wider in those days,” “What do you mean gran?” and then the first
look into Stella’s inner monologue, “She’s
[Lois, Stella’s daughter] forgot. Or did she ever know?(709)” The primal
piece of dialogue with its titular reference, joined shortly after by the third
person step-inside of Stella’s head, alert the reader, from the get-go, that
they’ll be experiencing the story of the Reach from Stella’s point of view.
The question posed to Stella,
the heart of her own discontent in life, delivered to the reader in the form of
Stella’s internal self-doubt is “Do you
love?(709)” The significance of this
question, it’s surface-relevance to the content of the story, is somewhat questionable;
the action of “The Reach” is in large part driven by the import of communally
inclusive memory and the fears associated with being left-outside (forgotten)
or acknowledging the outside-world (contradicted). The nostalgia and crass ruminations during
Russell’s funeral service, the curious “what would I say if they asked?”
scenarios that Stella creates in her mind as well as the repetition of breaks
in the narration—the “community secrets”— continuing in the form of external
analepsis flashbacks throughout the narrative, further cement the significance
of community as a source of manifest comfort and control (710, 712-714, 715-716,
718, 721-723).
Still, Stella answers the
question of love twice, the repetition making the askance, if nothing else, a
usable if seemingly taciturn plot device: “Yes, I
Love…or at least I tried, but memory is so wide and so deep, I cannot cross…”
and then with more fervor and out loud to the ghosts of her loved ones “Yes…yes
I will, yes I did, yes I do (716, 728).” This question becomes the concentration
of the plot only when yoked with the idea of community itself. In one of the “what if” scenarios in her mind,
Stella imagines explaining why she never left, why, like many friends and
family, she never gave in to her desires.
Her response is the reprisal of her initial answer, the whether or not
she can love: “I believe it is better to
plow deep than wide. This is my place,
and I love it (718).” In a violent
reconstitution of diction, King manages to connect memory (wide and deep) to
the idea of communal obligation (better deep than wide) creating a dichotomy of
identity within the character and transforming the original question (“Do you love?”) into a poignant psychological metaphor for
that dichotomy: Communal identity and obligation vs. Personal identity and
obligation to self; love thy neighbor vs. love thyself. Early on in the narrative, the audience is
introduced to the idea of death and the idea of spirituality (the bible like
list of the begotten, the frequent mentioning of the reverend, etc…). A list of living acquaintances and their dead
loved ones, including Stella’s dead best friend, is offered as proof that
Stella is not the only one to have chosen the community (religious, collective
cultural or otherwise) over the self (709-710).
However, when the ghost of Stella’s husband visits her while she
collects firewood and asks her “when you comin across to the mainland?” the reader begins to wonder whether or not
sacrificing personal identity (love of self) is the best choice for
Stella.
When the question of love is
revealed as a metaphor for identity the reader realizes the significance of not
only it’s meaning but also it’s structure; it’s the only italicized subject
(the initial question of love;
assumed to be a portion of internal monologue) followed by a roman (non-italicized)
descriptive verb; the question “plagued” her— much like the visions of the ghosts. The theme of being plagued and it’s
associations with the initial conflict (the question of whether Stella loves or
not) and its resurgence in the question of whether or not she will cross the
Reach are dramatized by the appearance of both the supernatural beings and the
ethos evoked within the reader because of Stella’s reaction to the ghosts “she
almost drops the firewood, but doesn’t.” Given the ghostly visitations, the constant
mention of death, the acceptance of winter within literary circles as an apt cliché
for the arrival of the end, the reader begins to sympathize with Stella, but to
empathize with her dead and waiting husband; he wants her to find her way, her
identity, and break from the safety of the “we take care of our own” mentality
in order to find peace within herself and peace with her impending death. That the narrator is the one to acknowledge
the plague of doubt Stella feels and that the ghosts recognize this doubt in
Stella’s character is the key to understanding the compelling nature of King’s
plot.
When the reader empathizes with
the ghosts, they do not, as would be expected, form a bond to the community of
Goat Island, Maine. Instead, they begin
reading in anticipation of Stella’s journey across the Reach. The remainder of the narrative becomes,
simultaneously, a series of events that help reinforce the established empathy (stories
about Stella’s sheltered life, some of the darker mysteries of Goat that help
to distance the reader from their attachment to the island, vivid descriptions
about the beauty of Reach, or the utility of the mainland, etc…) and further
the anticipatory urgency that Stella’s journey be taken (the description of her
battle with cancer, “globs of blood” spit in the toilet, the inevitability of
the blizzard, her arthritis)(719-723).
However, it only becomes apparent while Stella is lost and faltering in the
white out how the reader is, and has been for some time, engaged in the
narrative. “Like Jesus-out-of-the-boat”
Stella stands on top of the frozen reach seeing “nothing…” as she collapses and
gets up, falls again and loses her hat, the reader realizes they are waiting; hidden
behind the walls of snow with the ghosts, with the mainland and with the reach
itself (724-726). The reader no longer
sees the world from Stella’s POV, but from that of everything outside of the
Island—the reader is observing concurrently as him or herself and as the reach,
as the omnipotent narrator and the ethereal representations of Stella’s loved
ones. Though the resolution is a tad Deus ex machine, the successes of “The
Reach” in narrative structure, and technique, the repetition of thematic
elements and King’s mastery of invocation in the matters of suspenseful build-up
and ethos employing catharsis make this story a worthy and notable read. Most importantly, King answers the question
posed at the beginning of the narrative: “Do
You Love?” And as the reader
celebrates Stella’s reunion and listens to the songs of the dead with her son,
as they realize the question was posed by them and for them they think, “Yes, I
will, I have, I do.”
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