43 pages • 1 hour read
Stephen KingThe Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1999A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Narrative Perspective
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is written from the perspective of a third-person omniscient narrator. This allows King to relay the majority of the novel’s events from Trisha’s point of view, helping the reader empathize with her while maintaining narrative flexibility. At certain key moments, King uses his chosen narration style to illuminate the thoughts and actions of Trisha’s family members while she is missing. Although Trisha feels invisible to her family, the reader knows that they are distraught after discovering her missing.
King also uses the third-person omniscient style to provide the reader with key pieces of information that Trisha is not privy to. For example, after she turns northward in Chapter 9, “Top of the Seventh,” we learn that “this was a bad decision, the worst she’d made since leaving the path in the first place,” (233) as she narrowly misses finding a small town where she would have been saved. Moments like these heighten the tension of the narrative and allow the reader to feel as if they are both there with Trisha in the moment and rooting for her from afar. The narrator also periodically updates the reader on the search for Trisha occurring in the outside world. When the investigation veers off track without Trisha’s knowledge, her decisions become even more critical. The narrator knows how Trisha’s story will end, but the reader is left wondering until the very end, adding to the novel’s overall suspenseful tone.
Figurative Language
Throughout the novel, King uses evocative figurative language to highlight Trisha’s emotions and state of mind. He makes prolific use of metaphors and similes to help bring Trisha’s journey to life.
Shortly after realizing that she is lost, Trisha tries to shimmy under a fallen tree while looking for the path. As she does so, she is poked by a branch as “thick as an amputated forearm” (28) and feels a snake “[pulsing] under her palm like a cold muscle” (32). These grotesque descriptions of ordinary elements of nature convey how threatened Trisha feels by her unfamiliar surroundings and allow the reader to experience the woods through Trisha’s eyes. When Trisha first notices the presence of the creature later revealed to be the God of the Lost, King again uses figurative language to convey her fear. The sound of branches rubbing against one another is “the clotted croon of a monster” (114) and nearby trees become “bone faces with black eyes” (114). The twisted versions of normally innocuous sights and sounds highlight Trisha’s feeling that something in the woods is out to get her.
When Trisha is feeling hopeful, King alters his use of figurative language to reflect this change. Watching a meteor shower one night, Trisha compares the falling stars to a fireworks show, a pleasant thought that contrasts the frequent imagery of death, monsters, and body horror. By altering his language to fit Trisha’s moods, King helps the reader put themselves into her shoes and empathize with her character on a deeper level.
Humor
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is a suspenseful horror novel, and its central narrative is distressing. Although there is nothing funny about a nine-year-old-girl getting lost in the wilderness, King injects humor into the novel through Trisha’s character. Trisha has a robust vocabulary of idioms, curses and inside jokes which she uses near-constantly while talking to herself and Tom Gordon. Her humor carries her through intolerable situations—for example, when considering how emaciated she has become after days without food, she jokes that she’ll soon be able to model in Paris. After being severely sickened by stream water and nearing dehydration, she complains that her life is “the puppy-shits” (172).
Trisha’s ability to joke with herself is a real benefit to her in navigating the woods. Once, as she steels herself to eat a raw trout, she is able to shut off her logical mind by employing a favorite phrase of Pepsi’s: “when I want your opinion, I’ll rattle the bars in your cage” (225). Another time, she spiritedly shuts down her inner critic with a barrage of curses. King’s constant use of humor lightens an otherwise dark narrative and lends a feeling of authenticity to Trisha’s character as she uses humor to cope with pain and fear.
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