34 pages • 1 hour read
Stephen King1408
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Cigarette
Content Warning: The source material features discussions of suicide, self-harm, and distressing imagery. It also includes ableist language, specifically the author’s use of the r-word.
The cigarette that Mike tucks behind his ear every day symbolizes Mike’s superstition. Mike uses the cigarette the way most people might use lucky tokens like a rabbit’s foot or a four-leaf clover. During his meeting with Olin in the office, Mike instinctively reaches up to touch the cigarette. He repeats this gesture later on after Olin leaves him on the 14th floor, pairing it with a flick of his lucky shirt collar.
Mike also claims that the cigarette is a final measure in times of crisis, comparing it to cigarettes one might find inside emergency cabinets. Mike fulfills this purpose by pulling the cigarette out when he feels there is no escape from room 1408. Incidentally, doing so allows him to start a fire that gets him out through the door. In this sense, Mike is saved by his superstition.
The cigarette is also symbolic of Mike’s grief over his dead brother and the reflection of his own mortality. Whenever Mike disposes of the day’s cigarette in the toilet, he perceives the “faint yellow-orange residue of [...] sweat on the thin white paper” (368). Rather than push him to take up smoking again, its rusted appearance causes him to question how he was able to put up with the habit for so long. Nevertheless, Mike also muses that “reversion was the nature of things” (389), hinting that he knows his return to the habit is inevitable as long as he can guarantee his death by other causes.
Rooms
Rooms are a prominent motif in this story. Aside from room 1408, whose presence represents the Fear of the Unknown, the other prominent room in this story is Olin’s office, which appears in the second scene.
The first time the story presents Olin, he is lounging in one of the Hotel Dolphin’s “overstuffed lobby chairs” (366). This leaves him prone to the surprise of Mike’s appearance in the hotel and causes him to appear tentative from Mike’s perspective. When Mike and Olin move over to the hotel manager’s office, Mike perceives that Olin regains a sense of authority and confidence. The composition of Olin’s office displays his apparent warmth and worldliness, thanks to its décor, soft light, and pleasant pictures.
Olin’s office grants him a power he is unable to wield outside of it. Mike identifies the office as Olin’s special place and notices that the same effect occurred when he had earlier visited Olin in the company of his attorney. This foreshadows the idea that places can impart certain qualities on people, as is certainly the case later on when Mike enters 1408.
While Olin’s office empowers him, 1408 seems to drain the life of all those who enter it. Olin informs Mike that electronic devices fail to work properly in the room. Then he recalls his practice of supervising a pair of maids—initially twins—who perform a light turn service of 1408. He explains that the bond between twins seems to match 1408’s power, countering it to a certain extent. Without that connection, ill-fated accidents befall those who enter the room, including cleaning personnel who suffer from emotional fits and, in one case, blindness.
When Mike retires from writing at the end of the story, he takes refuge in his bedroom, making adjustments such as keeping the lights on all night and removing all telephones to counter the traumatic energy of his experience at 1408. As Olin remarks early on in the story, “[T]he only sure cure is to stay the hell out of that room” (375). Mike obeys this instruction to the very end, employing every effort to mentally escape the room.
Minicorder
Mike’s Sony minicorder is a totem of subjective reality. It functions as an arbiter of what is real by committing his thoughts and observations to record. As a result, it is Mike’s most trusted research instrument and is even described as “his friend” (385) on investigations. However, as the story unfolds, he comes to realize that he cannot trust in it any more than he can trust in his fading memory.
The first time the minicorder is used in the story, Mike weaponizes it against Olin to get his way. He keeps it on during their meeting to pressure Olin into making statements that would render him liable in court. Olin manages to subvert his intentions, however, by discussing Mike’s work and using his guilt and embarrassment against him. By turning it off, Mike strikes any further embarrassment from the record. When Olin begins to speak on 1408’s history, Mike turns the minicorder back on to collect his statement for research, demonstrating his irreverence for Olin’s warnings.
Once Mike sees the door of 1408 slanting and straightening, he finds his dependence on perception and anecdotal evidence breaking down. As he spends more time in the room, his recordings become increasingly incoherent. The turning point comes when Mike tries to escape the room and finds that the minicorder has vanished from his hand, reappearing in his shirt pocket. At this point, its status as a “faithful companion” (395) is evoked, suggesting that it has lost this function by being a device that the room can manipulate.
Related Titles
By Stephen King
