63 pages • 2 hours read

11.22.63

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2011

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Part 1, Chapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1: “Watershed Moment”

Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary

Al tells Jake the owner of the property where the diner sits has decided to build a retail store there. After a month, the diner will be removed and construction will begin, destroying whatever phenomenon caused the time portal, or “rabbit-hole” (89), as Al calls it. Before that happens, Al wants to stop the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He believes that by stopping that assassination, it will also stop a series of race riots and assassinations that followed.

Al tells Jake he went the through the rabbit-hole and waited as long as he could to stop the assassination, but he got too sick to stay. When Jake asks why he didn’t just kill Lee Harvey before he left, Al said that he wasn’t convinced enough that Lee Harvey was the lone shooter to take the chance that he was wrong. Al then tells Jake that someone shot at General Edwin Walker in April 1963 with the same gun that killed Kennedy. If Jake can prove Lee Harvey fired at Walker, then he can be confident Lee Harvey was the lone shooter. Al has written everything he knows about Lee Harvey in a notebook he gives to Jake.

When Jake asks how stopping Lee Harvey might impact the future, Al tells him he did a test. Al searched newspaper archives and found a young girl, Carolyn Poulin, who was accidentally shot while in the woods with her father. Al went through the portal and waited until the day Carolyn was shot. After a series of crazy accidents, he stopped the shooting. When he returned to 2011, he found the change had no observable impact on the future other than on Carolyn's life. This gave Al the hope he needed that changing the assassination of Kennedy would not adversely impact the future. However, Al reminds Jake that whenever someone goes through the portal, time is reset. Therefore, Jake’s trip through the portal that morning reset everything Al did on his last trip.

Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary

Jake goes home with Al’s notebook and thinks of Harry Dunning’s essay. He reads through it again. Jake points out that Carolyn’s life didn’t differ much from the life she lived in a wheelchair to the one she lived outside of it. Jake suggests that saving a family of five from being murdered would have a bigger impact and would be a better test of how changing the past would impact the future.

Al shows Jake a wallet, a driver’s license, several credit cards, a birth certificate, and a pile of cash he secured all in the name of George Amberson before leaving the past on his last trip. He also gives Jake a book with all the winning sports games between 1958 and 1963 so that he can make bets to earn more money. He tells him to get his hair cut so that he’ll fit in. Al accompanies Jake back to the diner where he will sit and wait the two minutes it will take for Jake’s return.

Part 1, Chapters 3-4 Analysis

Jake is filled with curiosity about how the rabbit-hole and time travel work, but Al does not have a lot of technical answers. Although these two men have access to the internet and modern libraries, neither does any research into time travel or anything else, as Jake himself will mention in a future chapter. Foreshadowing events at the end of the book, this seems to be King pointing out how reckless Al and Jake are as they dive into a time travel scheme they do not understand.

Despite their recklessness, even Jake and Al understand that changing the past can have an impact on the future. For this reason, they both worry about potential changes to the world they are currently living in. Al attempted to solve this issue by changing something in the past and coming back to the future to see if anything changed. In doing so, he ran into some odd, almost coincidental problems that he theorizes represent the past trying to resist change. This is a theory that Jake will adopt as well. King thus frames time itself as a living entity, which responds to stimuli and may even exhibit the motivations of a sentient being.

These chapters also introduce a less well-known event of 1960s America: The assassination attempt of General Edwin Walker. Walker was a highly-decorated veteran of World War II and the Korean War who ran afoul of Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy for his virulent public statements in support of white supremacy. In 1962, Walker was arrested for inciting riots in response to Black student James Meredith’s admission into the all-white University of Mississippi. After earning the support of numerous far-right groups, Walker was acquitted. According to the Warren Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, evidence strongly suggests that Lee Harvey Oswald was responsible for the attempt on Walker’s life on April 10, 1963.