58 pages • 1 hour read
Stephen KingRevival
Fiction | Novel | 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
Electricity
Electricity is the novel’s most prominent motif, underlining both The Dangers of Curiosity and The Dynamics of Science and Faith. Charles Jacobs’s experiments are fueled by electricity. During one of his first encounters with Jamie Morton, he offers to show him “miracles” on the Peaceable Lake model table that are eventually revealed to be electrical tricks. This entices the young Jamie to follow Jacobs’s experiments, especially as they become progressively more incredible. It also foreshadows the blurring of science and faith in Jacobs’s own mind, as well as how he will use the former to appeal to the latter in his revival tours.
Electricity follows Jamie throughout his youth—especially during Jacobs’s absence. Jamie discovers his talent for music when he picks up his brother Conrad’s abandoned electric guitar. He also loses his virginity to Astrid Soderberg when they visit Skytop at the onset of a hailstorm. These events warn him of the continued role Jacobs will play in his life.
Jacobs’s electrical treatments cure people but also expose them to the dangerous aftereffects that connect them to Mother and the Null. Jacobs disregards this collateral damage, arguing that he has helped more people than he has harmed and that those he has harmed do not really deserve consideration anyway. This emboldens him to continue his experiments, even though each aftereffect is essentially a portent of the truth he is trying to seek. The most direct warning comes during his penultimate experiment, when Astrid tells him that the one who waits in the world beyond life is “not the one [he] wants” (374). Jacobs proceeds with his experiment anyway, dragging along Jamie, who cannot help witnessing the results thanks to his own curiosity.
Ants
Ants are a recurring symbol of humanity’s insignificant place in the universe. Jamie hints at this in his opening narration when he suggests that the existence of fate means that humanity “live[s] in darkness like animals in a burrow, or ants deep in their hill. And not alone” (2).
Taken on its own, the image of the ant suggests smallness. People normally do not fear creatures so small, but King deploys images of ants that appear larger than usual. In Chapter 7, an ant appears in Jamie’s recurring dream, bursting through the moldy cake that the dead Mortons use to celebrate Jamie. In Chapter 8, Hugh runs out of Jacobs’s revival tent, claiming that he experienced an especially vivid prismatic of giant ants in the place of people. These images contribute to the novel’s horror by distorting the “natural” order, in which ants are so tiny as to seem insignificant.
The novel’s climax builds on this effect. When Jamie experiences his own vision of the world beyond life, he sees that the dead are being marched through a bleak city by an army of large ant creatures. The idea that people at the mercy of mere ants makes humans seem miniscule by comparison, highlighting their utter irrelevance to the universe at large (except perhaps as enslaved laborers). That the ants themselves serve much larger entities called the Great Ones, whose true size and intentions are unfathomable to people like Jamie, underscores this and epitomizes the novel’s cosmic horror.
“All that shit starts in E”
The key of E is a recurring motif that supports The Emotional Costs of Starting Life Anew. Jamie first invokes this motif in Chapter 4, discussing how his brother Conrad became interested in music through his friend’s grandfather, Hector the Barber. Hector the Barber taught that all blues music begins in the key of E, so when Jamie picks up Conrad’s guitar, one of the first things he learns is how to play the E chord. This ushers Jamie into the second phase of his life, which is defined by his relationship to music.
As an older man, Jamie returns to Harlow and reunites with his old bandmates from high school. They invite him to play one more set with them, and even though he declined to play guitar at Brianna’s wedding, he accepts out of sentimentality for his youth. When he says, “All that shit starts in E” (336), he signals that in spite of his attempts to reinvent himself, he has come back to where he started. This mirrors his continuous reunions with Charles Jacobs, who always finds a way back into his life even as Jamie tries to stay away from him.
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By Stephen King
