28 pages • 56 minutes read
Stephen KingThe Last Rung on the Ladder
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1978A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Loss of Childhood Innocence
The two parts of the story, the flashback to Katrina and Larry’s childhood, and the present day in which Katrina has died, create a stark view of the loss of innocence that children experience as part of their coming-of-age process. For Katrina, this coming of age includes the realization that the world is no longer a safe place. The only person she still trusts into adulthood is Larry, and he proves unreliable when she is in need.
Although the incident of Katrina’s fall from the ladder is terrifying, the early period in Katrina and Larry’s life is generally happy. They have a loving family and take care of each other. The barn, where most of the flashback takes place, is a peaceful and pleasant place for two young children (aside from the broken ladder). More importantly, Katrina feels safety and trust in the world around her, to a degree that Larry does not share. Larry can never bring himself to swan dive headfirst like Katrina does, noting, “I think I never believed the hay was there the way Kitty believed it” (299). She also lets go of the ladder rung when Larry tells her to without even knowing how he plans to save her. She explains to him later, “I knew you must have been doing something to fix it” (303). It is the ultimate trust fall, and she entrusts him with her life without a second thought.
As Katrina grows into adulthood, she gradually loses that sense of trust. Their mother dies, creating a hole in the family that their father cannot fill. Though it is not mentioned this shakes Katrina’s sense of security and may contribute to Katrina’s choice to form an emotional bond after high school through marriage rather than attending business school. Larry refers to her marriage to the beauty contest judge as “a dirty joke,” foreshadowing the series of predatory and unhappy relationships Katrina has with men. After her first divorce, she writes to Larry that “it might have been better if she could have had a child” (304), suggesting that she wanted children but either her husband was against it or there was a fertility issue. By the end of the story, Katrina is a sex worker in Los Angeles, a profession she enters as a last resort after finding no other options. The newspaper headline describing her death refers to her as a “call girl,” rather than by her name, a dehumanizing and exploitative act. Her choice to die by suicide signals that not only has she lost her childhood innocence, but she has also lost hope for living a fulfilling life.
The most significant expression of her loss of trust is that she no longer expects Larry to save her—or even visit—given the many times he has ignored her requests in the past. Her final letter signals that she lost her childhood innocence on the day of the accident, well before her adulthood. Though she only broke her ankle, the fall was a near-death experience, which she reveals when she opens her eyes and asks Larry, “Am I alive?” (302). Her miraculous survival also indicates that the fall affected her emotionally much more than she expressed. While she still trusted Larry, something fundamentally changed for her. Her tragedy is that, in her adult life, like Larry, she has no one to share her feelings with, leading her to despair.
Family Ties Versus Financial Success
The tension between family relationships and financial success first appears when Larry and Katrina are children. Shortly after Larry’s mother dies, the father loses the farm and begins selling tractors instead. Larry notes that this “was the end of the family” (295), hinting that the father is withdrawing from family life and devoting his time to his new career as a salesperson. Larry’s father becomes more and more successful, eventually buying a dealership and earning a management position, and the family continues to fragment as a result.
When Larry reaches adulthood, he follows a similar path as his father, choosing his career as a corporate lawyer to ensure his financial security. He is successful at his work and has all the outward trappings of accomplishment, from expensive clothes to multiple assistants. However, his workaholic tendencies prevent him from forming or maintaining relationships, including with his little sister, whom he adored and took care of when they were younger. Again and again, Larry chooses his career over Katrina, and eventually, he loses touch with her altogether. As a result, he is not there to support her when she is at her lowest point, right before her death. The story’s ending suggests that the Regret he feels over this will haunt him for the rest of his life.
Larry’s relationship with Katrina is not the only one that has suffered because of his focus on his career. He has no close friends or children, and he is divorced. His life does not seem to be a happy one, as he moves from city to city with no social network. Larry’s childhood and adulthood suggest that the women in the family were the ones who maintained the warmth and relationships families need to thrive. After their mother’s death and their father’s turn to his career in tractor sales, Larry notes that it was “the end of the family” (295). Likewise, Larry’s wife is the one who maintains contact with Larry’s family members by sending holiday cards. Larry does not feel any responsibility to maintain these relationships after his divorce, and this proves to be his deepest source of regret. The story is clear in its indictment of pursuing financial success over maintaining family bonds. It also emphasizes that maintaining those bonds would have been easy for Larry; he only had to visit Katrina and write to her. The story never mentions the possibility of them talking on the phone; long-distance calls were expensive, and the implication may be that Katrina could not afford it. With that limitation in place, the only real interaction between Larry and Katrina would have been for him to visit, which he never prioritized, just as his father never prioritized fixing the ladder.
Regret
Although Larry never explicitly states that he feels regret, this emotion is laced throughout the story, appearing in both the flashback and the present day. When Larry first jumps off the beam, he describes an instant of regret when he thinks “Oh, I’m sorry, I made a mistake, let me back up!” before he safely hits the hay pile (298). He also has several moments of questioning whether they should continue this game, as when he sees Katrina climbing the ladder and notes, “I didn’t like the way the ladder was swaying back and forth. It seemed like it had never been so loosey-goosey” (299). On his last trip up the ladder, he feels it start to break and is genuinely frightened for the first time, but he makes it safely up and onto the beam. After jumping, he tries to stop Katrina from following him, but she moves too quickly, and this time the ladder does give way. Although she survives the fall, he regrets that he didn’t stop the game earlier, and as his father spanks him for his role in the accident, he accepts it, indicating that he feels responsible.
This regret, though, is only a forerunner to the much deeper regret Larry feels at allowing himself to lose touch with Katrina over the years. At first, he notes, “She was the one who stopped writing” as though to absolve himself of blame (304), but he also recognizes that he did not visit her when she needed him, that his letters were self-absorbed, focusing only on his career, and that he should have updated his address with her. When he does finally receive her final letter, two weeks after her death, he states, “it’s funny how those crossed-off addresses and change-of-address stickers can look like accusations” (294, 305). He repeats this line at the beginning and the end of the story. This points to the guilt he feels at not getting around to giving Katrina his current address and the awareness that if he had done so, her last letter might have reached him in time. He keeps the newspaper article about her death in his wallet, carrying it “the way you carry something heavy, because carrying it is your work” (304), as a reminder of the steps he could have taken to prevent her death. It becomes a figurative albatross, as is seen in the poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798) by English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In the poem, a mariner uses a crossbow to shoot and kill an albatross that is leading his ship out of a storm. The sailors are angry with him and tie the dead bird around his neck; albatrosses are the world’s largest bird, almost the size of an adult person, so the bird is heavy and weighs the mariner down. He likens it to the cross of Jesus Christ, which he must bear as a reminder of his guilt. He is henceforth cursed to tell his story to everyone he meets.
Larry too is driven by the need to tell his story and addresses an unnamed “you” as the listener or reader. The narrative never states that this is the first time Larry is telling his story: His reference to the newspaper clipping as “heavy” and “work” could suggest an emotional burden, or it could suggest a compulsive need to repeat this story to anyone who will listen as a way to repeatedly punish himself for his guilt.
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