59 pages • 1 hour read
Stephen KingThe Outsider
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2018A 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
Truth and Justice
Justice is one of Ralph’s most deeply held values. He believes in following the rules laid out by the justice system even when those rules are hard and might result in a murderer going free. From the outset of the Peterson investigation, Ralph is therefore uncomfortable with what he is doing. His conscious mind is telling him it is all right to make an exception to his usual procedures because he knows the truth—that Terry is a vicious child-murderer who will almost certainly strike again. Furthermore, by every law of nature Ralph knows, the evidence against Terry is incontrovertible.
The key word is “knows.” Ralph takes it on faith that he knows what kind of things are and are not possible, but the US justice system is premised on the recognition of human fallibility. It uses laws and procedures to reduce human error as much as possible. With Terry’s death, Ralph recognizes the consequences of acting outside the blueprint of the legal system. He had believed that knowing the “truth” freed him to bend rules. However, bending rules is exactly what Ollie Peterson did, and a man who might have been innocent died.
Samuels describes Terry’s death as frontier justice, but Ralph now sees that mob rule and vigilantism are too prone to error. Nevertheless, circumstances soon force Ralph into vigilantism himself. The outsider must be stopped, but Ralph will never persuade the entire human race of its existence, especially when he hardly believes in it himself. The only way to fight it is with a small cadre of people who know the truth.
In the end, Ralph doesn’t have to violate his principles by killing the outsider. Holly is outside law enforcement and outside “normal” society. As a metaphorical outsider herself, Holly seems to have an implied right to judge the entity. She also has special knowledge that makes her the closest thing to an authority, so Ralph has, in effect, left judgment and execution to the proper agency and avoided violating his personal convictions.
More Things in Heaven and Earth…
In an infinite universe, all things are not just possible but inevitable. This principle underlies much of King’s work: Even his most outlandish plots, settings and monsters are explainable (though not necessarily explained) by scientific means, though the science may not yet be known. For example, the creature from It is an other-dimensional entity. King’s entire Dark Tower series is premised on the idea of an infinite number of universes with their own internally consistent laws. Likewise, the outsider turns out to be an organic living thing that humans could study and understand with the right tools.
The idea of the infinite universe is terrifying to Ralph because he can’t admit the possibility of the unimaginable. He has constructed a rigid mental filter to define what is and is not possible. His model of the universe tells him that objects can only exist in one place at one time, there is no such thing as a perfect double, DNA doesn’t lie, dreams aren’t real, and there are no monsters under the bed. When something arises that doesn’t fit into his construction, he either rejects it, or his entire worldview threatens to crumble and drag him down.
Holly copes better with the idea of infinity because she already feels that she doesn’t quite understand the rules that govern the world. The existence of outsiders is just one more piece of information no more or less likely than anything else. This doesn’t mean that she doesn’t test new information or that she accepts everything she hears without question. She uses concrete and methodical means to verify it.
Other characters with more imagination are able to take on faith that there is no end to the universe and anything might be found in it, but Ralph never really comes to terms with the infinite. He has to accept that there are things in the universe that are undreamt of in his philosophy, but to him, the idea is terrible. His recalcitrance may be disappointing to the reader who has been waiting for him to accept the supernatural, but it is in keeping with the fact that this is, after all, a horror novel. That being the case, Ralph is not wrong to see that for all there may be wonder and beauty in infinity, it is balanced by things likely far worse than the outsider. If the body of Stephen King’s work is anything to go by, then Ralph is more than justified in his reservations.
Faith and Doubt
The characters in The Outsider wrestle with various forms of faith and doubt. In addition to being a horror story, The Outsider is also a mystery, and the mystery genre is all about doubt. Doubt takes nothing on faith. It is the act of ruling out the impossible and accepting, even if reluctantly, the improbable.
Arthur Conan Doyle based Sherlock Holmes on an acquaintance, Doctor Joseph Bell—a neurologist and the founder of forensic science. The portrayal also draws on the published clinical lectures of another neurologist, Sir William Richard Gowers, who was known as one of the greatest diagnosticians of all time. One of Gowers’s aphorisms is that when the cause of the patient’s condition is unclear, the first step must be to set aside all preconceptions and assumptions and start over from data.
Doyle, via Holmes, applies Gowers’s principle to the solving of crime. Ralph, however, fails to apply it when Terry’s alibi comes to light. Where Holmes would set aside all assumptions and preconceptions and continue to gather data until he arrives at a solution, Ralph keeps trying to fit new information into his pre-existing ideas about the case. This is ironic given that Ralph views himself as a skeptic; he doesn’t doubt but rather places blind faith in his preconceptions about reality. This has always been good enough in the past, but it leaves him entirely unprepared to deal with an infinite universe.
Other characters, although they readily alter their assumptions about what is possible, do so not out of doubt but from faith. Their religion, their childhood beliefs, or their imagination all allow for something like the outsider. They don’t test those new beliefs any more than Ralph does. Only Holly, the better “diagnostician,” hears the evidence reported by Alec Pelley and performs the differential diagnosis, which she then tests.
The outsider turns the idea of faith versus doubt on its head. Ralph has put his faith in material evidence, but faith connotes belief without evidence. Ralph’s approach to the world is as much faith-based as any of the other characters. They will take on faith that the universe is large enough to include the supernatural. Ralph takes on faith that it cannot be, right up until he comes face-to-face with the outsider and receives material evidence of its reality.
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By Stephen King
