Analysis of ‘It,’ Part III

Here are links to Parts I and II, if you haven’t seen them yet.

XI: Georgie’s Room and the House on Neibolt Street

Officer Nell won’t get the boys in trouble if they tear down the dam (page 424). In his intervention, we can see more duality of good and bad. It’s good that he put an end to the unsanitary dam, but the building of the dam, as I said towards the end of Part II, was a symbolic controlling of their fears and of the turbulent unconscious, and so tearing it down is a symbolic taking-away of that controlling and mastery of fear.

Also, Stan is about to talk about his scary experience of It, but Officer Nell’s interruption stops Stan from benefitting from the same talk therapy that Bill, Ben, and Eddie have just enjoyed. Perhaps the lack of that talk therapy at that time has contributed to a bottling up of pain that ultimately leads to Stan’s suicide.

In Eddie’s case, knowing of the filth in the dammed-up water has only reinforced his fear of germs and his aversion to the dark world down under, symbolic of the unconscious and the Shadow. He’s never fully faced these fears, and so when he finally does face them in the climax, his still-relative weakness contributes to his death, in spite of how brave he eventually becomes.

Adult Richie is driving into Derry, and he has his own flashbacks about his childhood experiences there. These include the dam in the Barrens that Mr. Nell wanted torn down, as well as his being in Bill’s house, in Georgie’s room to see the photo album, going to the cinema to see horror films (including the Wolf-man), and an experience with Bill at the house on Neibolt Street.

When Richie and Bill are about to go into the Denbrough house, there’s a moment of contemplation about Bill’s troubled relationship with his parents, a sense that they preferred Georgie over him (page 429). The love he received seemed to be only because Georgie was also there, and now that Georgie is dead, the love for Bill is dead, too.

This favouring of Georgie is the basis of Bill’s sibling jealousy, and with his little brother’s death, Bill feels that he’s to blame for it, since he’d have had unconscious desires to get rid of the little boy. Bill knows he was less than an ideal brother to George, and they’d had plenty of fights.

On the day George dies, Bill is too sick to have a fight with his brother. Significantly, he was dreaming about a…turtle…(page 429) which he later forgets about. In the unconscious world of his dreams, Bill sees an image of the good crawling thing, while also in his unconscious, there’s the wish of a bad crawling thing to take away the brother who’s been stealing his parents’ love from him. Hence, Bill’s guilt. Hence, also, the dialectical relationship between the good crawling thing and the bad one.

An interesting choice of words is used to describe Bill’s and Richie’s entrance into the former’s house: they go in “like ghosts” (page 431). They’re about to experience the ghost of Georgie (or so it seems to them), but they themselves are the real ghosts, apparently. The point is that the experience of the supernatural, of Pennywise in the form of Georgie’s movie-like photos, is a projection of the two boys’ own Shadows, Bill’s in particular, due to his guilt over George’s death.

When the two boys look at one of the photos, Bill puts his fingers on the picture, whose image looks alive, like a movie, and his fingers go into the picture. Inside, the tips of his fingers are slashed, Richie yanks Bill’s arm away to get his fingers out of the photo, and they’re bloody and in pain. This injury parallels the ripping-off of George’s arm (pages 439-440).

And just as Georgie’s torn-off arm is a symbolic castration, so are Bill’s lacerated fingers. The experience is a reinforcing of Bill’s guilt over the unconscious jealous wish to be rid of George. The symbolic castration, the Lacanian interpretation of which I gave in Part I, represents Bill’s traumatic leaving of the narcissistic Imaginary, where he’d have his parents focusing all on him, and entering the social, linguistic world of the Symbolic, where he’s just one of many people sharing attention with each other. And as I said Part I, his stuttering–a difficulty with language–represents a difficulty fitting in with society, a difficulty entering the Symbolic, hence, Bill’s being in the Losers Club.

Richie, Ben, and Beverly going to watch horror movies at the cinema, and running into Henry Bowers and his gang, fits together with Richie’s and Bill’s scary experience at the house on Neibolt Street in one crucial way…the werewolf.

One of the films the three Losers watch together is I Was a Teenage Werewolf. When Henry is bullying the Losers, he’s only twelve, but as an adolescent, he’s close enough to being an early teen. He can be associated with the teen werewolf in a number of other ways, apart from his viciousness.

It’s noted that the “Teenage Werewolf was somehow scarier […]…perhaps because he also seemed a little sad. What had happened wasn’t his own fault.” (page 461) He “turned into the werewolf [because he] was full of anger and bad feelings…Henry Bowers was just overflowing with bad feelings…” (pages 461-462). Henry is abused by his drunken, PTSD-afflicted father, Butch, so we can see how bullying begets bullying.

We later learn, in the twelfth chapter, “Three Uninvited Guests,” that Henry, blamed for Pennywise’s killings in the late 1950s and convicted for the murder of his father, is–as an adult–in a mental hospital, where he hears voices “coming from the moon…A ghost moon.” (page 791) In this, we can see more associations between Henry and the Teenage Werewolf.

Since Henry and his gang go after Richie, Ben, and Beverly after they all watch the horror movies at the cinema, which of course include the werewolf one, we can see how this ties in with Richie’s and Bill’s experience at the house on Neibolt Street.

When Pennywise presents himself to the kids, it’s in the form of their greatest fears, whatever pushes their emotional buttons the hardest. In Eddie’s case, what crawled out of the cellar window of the house on Neibolt Street was a hobo leper, a personification of disease, something his mother has conditioned him to be terrified of. In Richie’s case, what appears there is the teenage werewolf.

This form is what terrifies Richie because it is associated with his encounter with Henry Bowers, the real teenage werewolf, as it were, who not only terrorizes the Losers, but who will also go lunatic in the lunatic asylum when he’s an adult. As I’ve said previously, Pennywise is the killer in the abstract, metaphorical sense: It personifies trauma. Henry is blamed for all the killings of the late 1950s in Derry, and I’d say perhaps he really is the killer in the physical sense, with Pennywise’s presence in the killings as an allegorical concept. After all, Henry is psychopathic enough to be the real killer. The situation is similar to the gay-bashing killing of Adrian Mellon: the homophobes killed him, while Pennywise was simply present when it happened.

And once again, some good accompanies all of this bad in how Richie and Bill experience the horror in Georgie’s bedroom and on Neibolt Street together. They can validate each other’s trauma and strengthen each other by bonding together over it. Watching the horror films together is also a bonding over trauma, if only in a symbolic sense.

XII: Cleaning Up

We next come to Beverly’s story, and how she is on her way to Derry after fighting her way out of the clutches of her abusive husband, Tom Rogan. I mentioned previously how her relationship with this man is a repeat, as object relations theory explains, of her relationship with her abusive father, Al, just as Eddie’s relationship with his obese, overprotective wife is a repeat of his relationship with his obese, overprotective mother.

In the parallels between Tom and Al vis-à-vis Bev, we ought to ponder how her relationship with her husband is, by definition, obviously sexual; and so just as Eddie’s relationships with his wife and mother are, in one sense or another, sexual (i.e., Oedipal with his mother), so are there disturbing implications about Beverly and her abusive father. While it’s understood that Al’s physically abusive with her, and we never come across explicit evidence of sexual abuse, there are a number of passages that suggest that the abuse is more than must physical and psychological.

All abuse, whether physical, sexual, or psychological, is a form of psychological abuse, because all abuse, at its core, is about the abuser’s wish to have power and control over the victim. It shouldn’t be all that surprising that a father wishing to dominate his daughter, especially a father that ‘worries’ about her being with boys, would want to exercise that dominance sexually, even if on only one or two occasions. When it comes to rape, one time is enough to be traumatizing.

In his chapter-by-chapter review of It, Gabe Rodriguez agrees with me that “it’s implied that [Al] has lust for his daughter”. His ‘worrying’ about her with other boys implies sexual jealousy, just like Humbert Humbert with Lolita. We may not see examples of sexual abuse between Al and Bev because such trauma is so deeply repressed, and so painful, that it never resurfaces as such in her memories.

One thing to remember about repression, though, is that it does return to consciousness, though in an unrecognizable form. Bill’s unconscious wish to eliminate Georgie comes back in the form of moving photos. Eddie’s fear of sickness resurfaces in the form of the leper. Richie’s fear of Henry returns as the teenage werewolf. And the trauma of repressed memories of sexual abuse for Bev could conceivably return in the form of a bloody sinkhole (pages 509-512)

The drain in the bathroom sink in Bev’s home can easily be understood as a yonic symbol (with its “slightly fishy smell”–page 510). Voices calling out for help from it can be understood, symbolically speaking, as projections of Beverly’s own wish to cry for help. Blood spraying out of the sinkhole (page 512) could represent menstrual blood (after all, soon after this incident, Bev sees herself in the same bathroom mirror and notices the growth of her breasts–she’s approaching womanhood–page 519), or it could be the blood of torn vaginal walls after one of her father’s painful intrusions. In this indirect sense, then, the bloody sink could be a resurfacing of the repressed trauma of a sexual assault, too painful to be remembered explicitly.

There are a number of passages suggesting Al’s sexual abuse of Beverly. Here’s an example: “He did not drink, he did not smoke, he did not chase after women. I got all the women I need at home, he said on occasion, and when he said it a peculiar secretive smile would cross his face…They take care of me, and when they need it, I take care of them.” (page 513, King’s emphasis)

Of course, with abuse also comes traumatic bonding, as is the case when Al shows Bev love and affection. When he hugs her, she feels her love for him, knowing he hits her only when she ‘deserves’ it. (page 516) The cycle of abuse, involving a swinging pendulum of nice and nasty, creates confusion in the victim’s mind: is being hit a form of love? Is the sexual abuse a form of love? The abusive father can manipulate his daughter’s Oedipal feelings for him in these physical and sexual forms of abuse, reinforcing his control through her love of him.

Since, apart from the other Losers, no one other than Bev sees the blood in the bathroom sink, she uses the fake story of having seen a spider crawling about there (page 523). Given what we know of Its actual appearance, the choice of a spider is an interesting one to hide what she’s actually seen. Once again, unconscious trauma resurfaces in different forms.

Another hint of sexual abuse comes when Bev’s mother, Elfrida, asks her if her father ever touches her (page 523). The little girl acts surprised at the question, but “God, her father touched her every day.” (page 523, King’s emphasis) Bev is haunted by the question for a while, as it reappears in King’s idiosyncratic use of parenthetical interruptions in the narrative: “(does he ever touch you)” and “(does he)” (page 523, King’s emphasis)

Recall that Al certainly does “(worry an awful lot)” about Bev with other boys, and this is because he’s projecting his lust onto them, and projection is one of the commonest defence mechanisms. That her mother calls his punitive anger “blue devil” should give you a good idea why blue (second meaning given here) is the colour.

Bev has sexual experiences with all the Losers. That she does this in the ‘innocent’ late 1950s is surprising enough; that she does this as a preteen is, at least, bordering on shocking, if not lapsing into that. That she may have endured sexual abuse from her father, the resulting trauma of which would give her a kind of ‘slut’ complex, would thoroughly explain why she gives herself to all of the boys so easily and so young…in the 1950s. If a girl is made to believe she’s a slut through rape, she may act that way, out of no fault of her own.

Because of Al’s suspicions of her with other boys, he demands that she take her pants off so he can check if she’s still a virgin (page 1173). Examining if she’s still “intact” or not, of course, is just an excuse for him to get her pants off. That alone is too terrifying for the little girl to bear. When his hands are on her, they are “gentle. And that was somehow scariest of all.” (page 1176) Small wonder she runs away from him afterward.

To get back to the part of the story with the bloody sink, though, we learn that not only do the other Losers believe Beverly about the blood, since only they see it other than her, but they also help her clean it up, hence the name of Chapter 9. Once again, in the form of the kids’ solidarity and mutual validation of Bev, we can see goodness mixed in with all of the bad, that duality that pervades It in so many different forms, as well as in the traumatic bonding of Al with Bev. Showing her love and affection is good in and of itself, but his use of those positive feelings to manipulate and control her is all the more evil.

With the solidarity and validation the boys give Beverly, now Stan can finally tell them of his scary experience of It at the Standpipe (pages 542-553). After he tells them of his experience, and of fending off It by calling out the names of various birds from his bird-book 9page 553), he muses about what is worse than being frightened–being offended (page 557).

This sense of being offended gives us a clue as to why Stan is the one who kills himself. “You can live with fear…Maybe not forever, but for a long, long time. It’s offense you maybe can’t live with…” (page 558, King’s emphasis). The supernatural events offend a sane person’s sense of order, in Stan’s thinking. These things are shocking because they are so inexplicable; they’re traumatic because one can’t process the experiences. Stan is contemplating the indescribable, ineffable, undifferentiated world of Lacan’s Real. He can’t bear to endure it again as an adult, so he kills himself in his bathtub.

XIII: Derry: the Second Interlude

In “Derry: the Second Interlude,” Mike recalls the fire at the Black Spot in 1930. The Black Spot was a nightclub essentially for black soldiers from a nearby army base. It was burned down by the Maine Legion of White Decency, a secret society of white supremacists like the Ku Klux Klan (page 576).

Mike asks his father, William, about the historical background of the fire, and while the obvious racism behind the motive to burn the Black Spot isn’t to be denied, his father insists that there was more to the fire than just prejudice against blacks. In William’s opinion, “the Legion of White Decency was just another seed” (page 577), and it seemed to him “that bad things, hurtful things, do right well in the soil of this town,” Derry (page 578). What’s implied here with the “seed” planted in the “soil” is that William intuits the presence of Pennywise.

What’s linked to the racism behind the Black Spot fire is the racism of Henry Bowers and his father, Butch, against specifically the Hanlon family. Apart from hurling the usual racial slurs at Mike, we learn that Henry–at the age of ten and thus already demonstrating his psychopathy–killed Mike’s dog, Mr. Chips. Butch, who as Mike’s father observes, “was never right after he came back from the Pacific” (page 582), took a lot of his pain out on blacks and “nigger lovers,” and even killed a number of William’s chickens (page 583). Both fathers were farmers, but since Will Hanlon’s farm was more successful, Butch envied him, feeling humiliated that a black farmer had outdone him.

A similar envy could be seen in the white racists’ reaction to the fixing-up of the Black Spot, a bunch of blacks transforming the originally filthy dump of a place into a successful night club (page 594). The plan to fix up the place was suggested by Pfc. Dick Hallorann, also a character from The Shining.

Dick’s “shining” abilities helped him to save Will and several other club goers from the fire, going “back toward the bandstand…toward the fire” (page 602). He’s called crazy for wanting to go that way, but this is another interesting incidence of that duality of good mixed with bad that pervades It, just as when adult Bill with catatonic Audra on his bike, Silver, snaps her out of it only by risking death with her as they race around at the end of the novel. Dick similarly saves Will and the others by facing the fire, then going out a window (page 603).

Outside the burning nightclub, Will saw something disturbingly unusual, yet he hesitates to tell his son what it was. Mike senses correctly what it was by synchronicity, and while afraid to have his suspicions confirmed, he must know the truth, just as Lot’s wife had to see the burning pair of sinful cities, a sight that killed her (pages 608-609).

His father saw a giant bird, the same bird Mike saw four years earlier (page 609). Naturally, Mike gets a chill from the revelation of this synchronicity. We also learn that the bird didn’t hover. “It floated.” (page 609) There were also “big bunches of balloons tied to each wing,” an obvious reference to Pennywise.

Because Mike is convinced that “It’s come again” (page 609), he’s written everything down “in a kind of frenzy” page 610), his desperate attempt to use writing therapy to soothe his relapse into his old childhood traumas. Though he’s worn himself out with writing all night, and even slept with his notebook and pen on the table there in front of him, he wakes up “feeling free, somehow…purged of that old story” (page 610).

Since It attacks people based on their fears (Bill’s guilt over Georgie, Richie’s Henry/werewolf association, Bev’s bloody sink/damaged yoni association, Eddie’s fear of sickness and leper perverts), we can see why Mike shudders at the thought of the big bird, and how his father saw the same unsettling sight. We eventually learn of Mike’s instinctive fear of birds from an incident when he was a baby of only six months old, and a crow was pecking at him (page 1318). As for his father’s experience of the big bird, perhaps it was linked to the killing of his chickens. After all, both that killing and the deaths from the Black Spot fire were race-related.

And just to complete Mike’s relapse into his old trauma state in the mid-1980s, he sees a balloon tied to his reading lamp, filled with helium. A picture of his face is on it, with blood pouring out from where his eyes are supposed to be. The crow got at him after all, apparently. (page 610)

XIV: The Reunion

The adult Losers are all in Derry, and they meet with Mike in a Chinese restaurant for dinner. Ben tells of how he lost the weight as an adolescent and kept it off. Richie’s trash-mouth goes off constantly, and the others say “Beep-beep” to him as a kinder, gentler way to tell him to shut up. Fortune cookies are served for dessert, and they’ll make quite a spectacle soon enough.

Since everyone remembers the childhood events only very vaguely still, Mike suggests they all break up and go to whichever places in Derry they remember best (except the Barrens, which I imagine might bring up unconscious traumas they won’t yet be ready to deal with)…in order to jog their memories.

Finally, they get around to eating the fortune cookies. Since Richie uses humour to deal with his trauma, he jokes about reading a fortune that says he’ll “SOON BE EATEN UP BY A LARGE MONSTER. HAVE A NICE DAY.” (page 682) Instead of getting another “Beep-beep” from the others, they all laugh. A bit of appropriate humor can definitely ease the tension a bit.

Bill is the first, however, to realize that breaking open their cookies to read their fortunes is a bad idea. Nobody has gone for a fortune cookie until Mike passes around the bowl of them. Everyone, at least unconsciously, knows that his fortune in Derry cannot be a good one, hence the delay in touching the cookies. When Beverly grimaces upon opening hers, Bill realizes that, in spite of everyone’s huge lacunae of forgotten traumatic memories in Derry, “Somehow, some part of us still remembers…everything.” (page 683) No memory is forgotten: it’s all just repressed, pushed back into the unconscious.

Beverly sees blood spurting up from her fortune cookie, an obvious reference to the bloody sinkhole incident. Note the choice of words in the description on page 683 (my emphasis): the blood was “a bright red that sank in [the white tablecloth] and then spread out in grasping pink fingers.” Those “grasping pink fingers” could have only been Al’s.

Eddie sees “a huge bug…pushing its way out of his fortune cookie” (page 683), this bug being an obvious reference to his fear of germs, of bugs. Bill notices it, and understands it to be “some sort of terribly mutated cricket.” Notions of disease or mutation always link with the fear of not being healthy, of not being normal. Not being normal means being vulnerable to bullying (as a Loser), just like being vulnerable to disease.

Richie sees an eye in his fortune cookie. He’s staring at it “in a kind of sickened leer” (page 683). The “human eyeball stared with glazed intensity” right back at him. Since Richie is a DJ and a comedian (of sorts), he’s going to be sensitive to what his audience thinks of him as a performer. Any eyes looking at him with criticisms, ranging everywhere from the most trivial “Beep-beep” to the most scathing of them, will be difficult for him to deal with. Also, that staring eye is a projection of his own leers, of his own staring, a reminder that Trashmouth is quite the critic himself.

Ben sees teeth in his fortune cookie, and his instinctive reaction is to throw the cookie across the table (page 684). The teeth must have triggered in his unconscious his childhood overeating habits; the teeth are a mocking mirror reflecting his former size. Their biting nature, the way “they rattled together,” may have also prompted memories of Henry’s digging knife.

Bill never opens his fortune cookie: he’s too busy trying to stop Beverly from screaming at the sight of the insect from Eddie’s cookie. Bill does, however, “see its sides moving slowly in and out–bulge and relax…” (page 684). Could those movements be from a winking eye, by chance? “It had swelled like some unimaginable boil which was filling with pus. And still it pulsed slowly in and out.” (page 686) Is it a tiny heart?

As for Eddie’s insect, it looks as if it’s dying. As an association with disease and dying, the cricket looking that way is a fitting finishing touch to Eddie’s fears.

Bill knows they must all calm down to avoid making a scene, since Rose, their server, will soon be back and, not seeing any of the supernatural frights, will think they’re all crazy.

After Rose is finished asking how their meal was, Bill finally gets an idea as to what is in his cookie. He sees “a leg poking blindly out of his fortune cookie,” scraping at his plate (page 686). A leg is a limb: seeing this, and none of the rest of the tiny body, isn’t all that much dissimilar to the arm of a little boy that’s separated from the rest of his body.

Then Richie looks at Bill’s cookie and sees “a great grayish-black fly…slowly birthing itself from the collapsing remains of his cookie.” (page 686) It’s as though, through the association of bugs and disease, that Richie, Bill, and Eddie are sharing the same fear, giving each other mutual validation of that fear.

As Bill remarks after Rose leaves, it’s “a mutant fly” (page 687), further reinforcing the associations with Eddie’s experience of the “mutated cricket.” As members of the Losers Club, they all feel like mutants of a sort–sick, odd, different, and thus vulnerable to the bullying of people like Henry. Bill recalls, through this fly in the cookie the old short story of “The Fly,” later made into a movie. “The story scared the bejesus out of [Bill]” (page 687). The scientist in that story, with his head and hand swapped with those of a fly, felt similarly alienated from the world as the Losers do.

The fly from the cookie grows into the size of a sparrow, Bill covers it with his napkin, and Bev needs to leave the room to throw up. The fears are inside all of them, and they need to get these fears out of themselves, which is what her vomiting represents. A growing bug is Bill’s growing fear, also an idea he has for a new horror novel: writing about the fear gets it out of him, too.

Speaking of getting out, Mike rightfully advises them all to leave the restaurant right away. Bill knows It is up to Its old tricks, using the Losers’ inner fears to scare them all out of Derry.

XV: Walking Tours

As Ben is on his way to the old library, he’s going over childhood memories, having them come back to him at first in fragments. The silver dollar. Chüd (page 692). What did these things mean, though?

In the library now, he applies for a library card. He starts hearing a voice–only he can hear it. The only thing the woman making his library card notices that’s strange is his behaviour, including his perspiration (page 702).

As she’s off to type up the information on his card, he looks up and sees Pennywise on top of a staircase (page 703), “looking down at him…[with] a killer’s grin.” Ben knows he can’t react to what only he sees and hears there, for fear that everyone else in the library will think he’s crazy. This, of course is perfectly true, for Pennywise, properly understood, is a monster not of the physical world, but of the mind. It’s trauma personified.

Pennywise keeps calling Ben to go up the stairs to meet It face to face, but Ben knows he’ll want to face the clown by going down into the darkness, the unconscious of the sewers, where It “won’t want to see me…We’re going to kill you.” (page 704, King’s emphasis)

Naturally, Pennywise knows what Ben’s thinking (about killing him), because Pennywise is in Ben’s thoughts. The clown is taunting Ben in Richie’s “Pickaninny Voice,” warning him to get out of Derry while he still can (page 704).

It’s worthwhile to consider why King chose to have It present Itself primarily as a clown, of all forms. Apart from what we know that children often find clowns frightening, there’s also the fact that clowns are supposed to be funny. Since so much of the Losers’ childhood trauma is based on having suffered bullying (hence, their collective name), we should consider the juxtaposition of a source of terror with one of humour.

Apart from terrorizing his victim, a bully will commonly use humour in his belittling of his victim. Henry calling young, overweight Ben “Tits” (a reference, of course, to his ‘boy-boobs’) is meant to elicit laughter from the rest of Bowers’s gang. Bullies fancy themselves comedians, making fun of their victims. Narcissistic, emotionally abusive parents are also clowns, properly understood.

On top of this, Pennywise does an imitation of Richie, of all people, a guy who fancies himself a clown, of sorts. It’s mocking one of Ben’s friends, which can make Ben empathize with Richie; but also, since the clown is doing Richie’s Pickaninny Voice, a stereotype of black people, this mockery can also be understood as belittling a friend of both Ben’s and Richie’s…Mike.

Part of the reason the Losers keep saying “Beep-beep” to shut Richie up is because his inappropriate, trash-mouth humour reminds them, on at least an unconscious level, of the taunting humour of bullies like Henry. Richie’s humour also used to provoke Henry himself back when they were all kids, so his big mouth was potentially dangerous for them.

Pennywise mocking Richie before Ben, thus, is like holding a mirror up to his face, telling one of the Losers that, in a way, they’re just as bad as It. After all, he wants to kill It, doesn’t he? It even accuses Ben of killing the children in Its screaming, taunting voice (page 702), a clear case of projection on Its part.

Eddie’s wandering around Derry leads him to the Tracker Brothers’ Truck Depot. These brothers, two life-long bachelors named Phil and Tony, also had an immaculately clean, white mid-Victorian house. One would think that Eddie’s mom would accept her little boy going into such a clean house, but she assumed such a spotless house kept so clean by two unmarried men had to have been the home of homosexuals (page 712).

As for the Truck Depot, it was the filthy opposite of their house. The back of the building was used for playing baseball, and kids were invited to play there (page 713). Eddie, for obvious reasons, would never have been allowed by his mom to play baseball there.

The hypochondria and fear of germs his mom imposed on him is clearly a form of emotional abuse. Even two men living in a spotless house, actually just brothers, are assumed to be a pair of filthy “queers.” Nothing could possibly be clean enough for her.

Eddie walks out across the area where they used to play baseball, all the way to the fence, beyond which “the ground slipped down, aggressively green,” to the Barrens (page 720).

He contemplates what he feels is a misnomer for this area of land down there. There’s nothing barren about the Barrens. It’s quite the opposite, actually. If anything, it ought to be called “the Wilderness,” or “the Jungle,” especially now, since “the Barrens were more junglelike than ever” (page 720).

To make matters worse, Eddie feels that the name “Barrens” sounds ominous and sinister. “Barrens” implies a desert, a place of lifelessness. The “stretch of such tangled and virulent growth” implies an abundance of life, and the choice of the word virulent brings back Eddie’s fear of germs and disease. So the dialectical opposites of virulent and barren are sublated with the idea of disease bringing on death, Eddie’s greatest fear.

Furthermore, barren reminds Eddie of how all the Losers are childless, as Mike noted in the Chinese restaurant. In spite of how successful all of them turned out in terms of their careers, they were all ‘the barren ones,’ the Barrens. As kids, they all hung out in a place that would become their namesake, Eddie realizes.

As he’s turning away, he sees a cement cylinder, the kind of thing Ben used to call “Morlock holes.” (page 721) Going in there was going into the sewers, the hell of the unconscious mind, the land of repressed trauma, where all the filth and germs are.

Memories of the Barrens, as well as Henry Bowers’s gang chasing them in there, make Eddie want to leave, to be home with Myra, his new mama. And just then, he hears the voice of It. It tells him to catch a baseball tossed over the fence; he catches the ball so well, it’s as if he were an experienced baseball player (page 721). This ability at, and participation in, a game his neurotic mother forbade him to play should frighten him.

As soon as he catches the ball, it turns into a ball of string that’s unraveling (page 722). He realizes that It is with him when he sees the string going over the top of the fence “like a strand of spiderweb.”

The voice that’s calling out to him to play ball is that of Belch Huggins, who was murdered in the tunnels of Derry back in August of the late 50s. Belch was with Henry’s gang at the time, chasing the Losers in the sewers. Now, adult Eddie sees Belch coming out of the Barrens area to meet him on the other side of the fence.

When they meet, Belch offers Eddie a blowjob, just like the leper crawling from the cellar window in the house at 29 Neibolt Street. And sure enough, Eddie sees Belch transformed into that leper.

What Eddie sees here is a number of parallels reflecting his fear of germs and, ultimately, his domineering mother’s disapproval. Belch crawling out of the Barrens, one symbol of the unconscious, parallels the leper crawling out of the cellar, another such symbol. The filthy house at Neibolt Street parallels, on the one hand, the filthy Truck Depot, and on the other, the all-too-clean house of the Tracker Brothers, those life-long bachelors assumed by Eddie’s ignorant mother to be filthy “queers.” These men play ball with boys, just as the leper wants to ‘play ball’ with Eddie in another sense.

After continuing to be terrorized by It in other forms, Eddie finds the scariest one to be that of Patrick Hockstetter, one of the Bowers gang. What’s especially scary about Patrick is how sociopathic and solipsistic he was when alive. We will eventually learn how disturbed Patrick was in the chapter titled, “Another One of the Missing: The Death of Patrick Hockstetter” (pages 1045-1090), in which we learn of him murdering his baby brother at the age of five, his hobby of killing flies, collecting them in his pencil case, and presenting them to the other kids on the playground. He’s also seen by Beverly to be jerking off Henry in the Barrens.

Patrick’s killing, collecting, and displaying flies can be linked to Eddie’s and Bill’s fortune cookies, and seeing bugs crawling out of them. As one of Henry’s gang of bullies, Patrick also bugs the Losers. Though it was Beverly, rather than Eddie, who saw Patrick giving Henry a handjob, the association with homosexuality also links thematically with adult Eddie’s overall experience there at the Tracker Brothers’ Truck Depot.

All of these triggers of Eddie’s fear of filth and germs, including seeing a message on a balloon saying, “ASTHMA MEDICINE CAUSES LUNG CANCER!” (page 725), make him run and run from the Truck Depot area (page 726). He collapses where some kids see him and, thinking he’s a wino with a weird disease and may even be the child-killer, keep away from him. It has projected Its pathologies onto Eddie, just as It did onto Ben in the library.

Beverly is walking down Main Street, thinking about Ben’s three-line love poem to her, and how she, as a child, hid it in her lower bedroom drawer, among her underwear, so her father would never find it and suspect she was being naughty with boys. Imagining him still alive and still living in Derry, she wants to find the old apartment house they lived in and visit him.

As abusive as Al was to her, she is convinced that he has loved her. In this understanding, we can see how she has been able to reconcile what Melanie Klein would have called the good father and the bad father, a mental reconciliation called the depressive position. Her love of Bill, back in 1958, was a transference of her Oedipal love of her dad, since the authority Bill projected had a paternal quality, yet Bill, unlike Al, listened to her (page 727).

She finds the old apartment house, 127 Lower Main Street (page 729), and rings the doorbell a couple times (page 731), thinking about Ben’s poem again, and wondering if she’d begun menstruating at eleven, around the time her breasts had begun growing…also around the time she’d seen the blood in the sinkhole (see above).

Al doesn’t answer the door. Instead, it’s an old woman. She tells Beverly that her father, Alvin Marsh, died five years ago (page 732). The old woman’s name is Mrs. Kersh, a name Beverly’s misread on the mailbox for the first floor, where her father lived. This misreading represents how Bev has equated the old woman with her dad in her mind…and equated her with her mom, too.

This equating is significant, given how we just explored the good and bad father in Al, and how we’ll see the good and bad mother as represented in Mrs. Marsh…er, Kersh. For just as Al both ‘loved’ and abused Bev, so did Elfrida, as dead now (cancer) as Al, both ‘love’ and look the other way (for the most part, at least) whenever he abused their daughter. Put another way, Bev’s encounter here with Mrs. Kersh is a transference of Elfrida onto this old woman.

For the moment, we’re seeing the good mother transference in Mrs. Kersh as she shows hospitality to Beverly. Soon enough, though, the bad mother will come out.

Very little did Mrs. Kersh know Al (page 733), as she tells Bev in a manner like the inverted syntax of Yoda, who knew Anakin, who was also sometimes the good father, sometimes the abusive, bad one, cutting off Luke’s hand. Elfrida also little knew Al, from her looking away when he did…what he did…to her.

Mrs. Kersh, as the good mother transference, invites Beverly in and makes some tea for them. The changes made to her old home make it feel safe because it is almost all different (page 733). She tells Mrs. Kersh that she loves what’s been done with the place (page 736), but she’s sure she saw Marsh under the doorbell, not Kersh.

Beverly begins to observe other strange things about this old woman. She’s sure Mrs. Kersh’s teeth were white when they first met…now she sees yellow teeth (pages 736-737). Her eyes and hair have changed, too…uglier. Bev hopes Mrs. Kersh won’t see a negative reaction on her face.

The old woman mentions her father, calling him Robert “Bob” Gray, then Pennywise the Dancing Clown (page 737). Laughing, she has some black teeth now. The good mother transference is turning into the bad mother, a witch, and Beverly is feeling like Gretel in her home (page 739).

The witch says, “Oh, my fadder and I are one” (page 738), recalling John 10:30. The Biblical quote is meant to be understood as a good thing, of course. She, however, is one with Pennywise (the devil of this cosmology, remember), or more accurately, with Bev’s father. Put another way, the good and bad mother are one, the good and bad father are one, and mother and father are one.

Bev runs for the door, while the cackling witch is warning of what will happen to her and her friends if they stay in Derry. As she’s running out, she looks back and sees her father in the witch’s dress (page 740). He says to her what’s been implied over and over again in the childhood flashbacks: “I beat you because I wanted to FUCK you, Bevvie…” The bad witch mother is the bad rapist father. Her mother’s emotional neglect was every bit as abusive, in its own way, as her father’s terrorizing was.

Outside, Beverly looks back again and sees Al in Pennywise’s clothes, instead of the witch’s dress (page 740). It’s holding a child’s severed leg, reminding us of Georgie’s arm. Pennywise is equated with Al because the former is the personification of the trauma caused by the latter.

To sum up the situation with the good and bad mothers and fathers, as well as their transferences, they are all another manifestation of the duality of good and bad as I have mentioned as appearing here and there throughout the novel in various forms.

Richie is walking along Outer Canal Street, remembering a time when he was a kid and Henry’s gang was chasing him (page 743). He’s also trying to convince himself that what he and the others saw in the fortune cookies was just a group hallucination. After all, Rose didn’t see anything, just as Bev’s parents hadn’t seen any blood in the bathroom sink.

Richie remembers when, as a kid, he was the class clown, and that now, he has resumed that role (page 744). This remembering can be linked back to when Ben, in the library, saw Pennywise doing Richie’s Pickaninny Voice, accusing Ben of killing the children, and implying that the Losers are, in their own way, as bad as It is (see above). Richie’s a clown, as is Pennywise. They are mirrors held up to each other.

Just as Pennywise, personifying the Losers’ trauma, is a projection of theirs outward, so does Pennywise project his evil right back onto them. Abusers often project their vices onto their victims, as Al did his lechery onto little Beverly, and since the Losers are the novel’s protagonists, this projection of evil back and forth between them and Pennywise is another example of that dialectical duality appearing and reappearing at so many points in the novel.

Richie comes to City Center and sees the huge statue of Paul Bunyan there (page 746). He finds it idiotic and as cheerfully vulgar as he found its size overwhelming as a child. When it was built, there were those who thought it would be a great tourist attraction, while others thought it would be horrible, garish, and gauche (page 747). Since some find clowns amusing and entertaining, while others find them evil and scary, the giant Paul Bunyan statue, with its axe, can be seen as a double of Pennywise.

The association of these two is strengthened when we remember Richie, as a kid, having run away from Henry’s gang, who’d chased him from school until they lost him in Freese’s Department Store, then the exhausted boy was on one of the benches in front of the statue (page 748). The chase was provoked by Richie’s trash-mouth reaction to Henry slipping and falling on a wet floor at school.

As he was resting, he saw a message advertising a concert with performers like Jerry Lee Lewis, The Penguins, and Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps. Though the ad says it’s “WHOLESOME ENTERTAINMENT” (page 752), the boy’s mom wouldn’t have thought so, meaning there was no chance of little Richie seeing the show. Recall that, as a DJ, Richie has always found this kind of entertainment to be right up his alley. Since he’s something of a showman himself, he can identify with rock ‘n’ roll stars, which will be most significant a little later in this section of the chapter.

Adult Richie, by the Paul Bunyan statue again, is delighted to see a new ad for a rock show, this time with Judas Priest and Iron Maiden (page 754). He contemplates how the statue’s appearance has changed over the years. The grin on its face no longer looks cheery, and now we begin to see how Paul Bunyan is a double of Pennywise (page 756).

The statue starts to speak.

Like the giant in “Jack and the Beanstalk” (recall how many references to children’s stories there are in It), Paul’s statue says he’ll eat Richie up if he doesn’t give back his hen, harp, and bags of gold (page 756).

Richie rolls off the bench he’s been sitting on, and Paul’s axe slashes the bench (page 757). So, being terrorized by giant Paul Bunyan is like being chased by Henry Bowers’s gang all over again. In these connections between the school bullies, the statue, and Pennywise, we see how the third of these threats is just a psychological terror, causing the hallucinations that Richie’s convinced he saw in the Chinese restaurant, and reviving his old childhood traumas.

The mental associations are iconic (Bunyan/Pennywise, both by turns comic and scary) and localized (City Center, near where the bullies chased Richie). After the statue is no longer terrorizing him, just as when he knew he was safe from the bullies, Richie sees the ad for the rock shows again. Now, though, it’s all for dead rock starts, including the three who died in the famous plane crash of February, 1959…and the show is dedicated to Richie. “YOU’RE DEAD TOO!” it tells him (page 762), associating Richie as a performer with them.

The associations between Paul Bunyan and Pennywise are made complete when Richie looks up at the statue and sees the clown instead of the lumberjack (page 763). After the two exchange taunts, Pennywise alludes to Matthew 7:5 (page 764), about removing the beam from one’s own eye before removing the mote from someone else’s eye. This would be a comment on the giving and receiving of projections of evil as discussed above. The idea will be further developed below.

Richie finds himself speaking in a new, stereotyped black man’s voice, one he’d never done before, in an attempt to threaten Pennywise (pages 764-765) Apart from him again using his sense of humour and theatricality as a manic defence against his trauma, his use of this voice seems to be a mirrored parody of Pennywise having done the Pickaninny voice to Ben in the library. Then Richie begins to run like hell.

Pennywise’s voice thunders after him, saying, “We’ve got the eye down here, Richie…[…] give a great big hi to our great big eye!” (page 765) We’re reminded of the eye Richie saw in his fortune cookie. There’s also the removing of motes or beams from one’s eye alluded to here.

Richie looks back, and seeing neither Paul nor the clown, he now sees a giant statue of Buddy Holly, one of the three killed on “the day the music died.” (page 765) Also, like Richie, Buddy wore glasses, acceptable for a rock ‘n’ roll star back in the 1950s, but nerdy by 1980s standards. Richie is being mirrored and identified with Buddy in these two ways: a loser of life, and a just-plain Loser. Richie’s aspired to be a giant among performers, yet will he also die as such?

To complete the Richie/Buddy/nerd link, Richie sees tape on Buddy’s glasses (page 766). More associations can be made here: adhesive tape on glasses implies ones that aren’t very good for seeing through, which in turn implies impaired eyesight, like the mote or beam in one’s eyes. Someone idolizing pop star ‘giants’ or other such performers isn’t using his eyes very well, either. Visual hallucinations, such as seeing an eye in a fortune cookie, is certainly not seeing well.

He finally sees that Paul Bunyan the giant statue is back to normal, with its axe back over its shoulder; but his eyes are suddenly in agonizing pain. Even when the hallucinations of a living Paul Bunyan, Pennywise, and Buddy Holly are gone, his eyes are still doing him wrong. Richie even almost jabs his forefingers into his eyes (page 766). It’s as if, unconsciously, he wants to blind himself, so he won’t ever see traumatizing things again.

His contact lenses are hurting his eyes. They’re like the mote and beam he has to get out of his eyes. He blinks to get them out, and he–aided by a nearby high school girl–searches the sidewalk for almost fifteen minutes trying to find them (page 767).

Bill is walking up Witcham Street, and he pauses by the drain where George was killed (page 767). He won’t see Pennywise this afternoon, but he will see a ghost. He peers into the drain, wanting to confront the clown that killed his little brother, even threatening that he and the Losers will go down there and get It.

He gets no answer from It, but a boy of about ten with a skateboard approaches, wondering why Bill is talking into the sewer. Though the boy at first would seem to think that Bill is crazy, it turns out that he, too, has heard scary voices from the sewers (page 768).

In a sense, this boy could be said to be the ‘ghost’ that Bill sees, though as we learn later in this section, ‘seeing a ghost’ actually comes from a tongue-twister poem. Still, this boy could be the ‘ghost’ in the sense that he reminds Bill of Georgie. Bill has a kind of George transference for the boy, causing him to feel affection for him (page 773).

That the boy says he shouldn’t be talking to strangers, because of the recent spate of killings, further establishes the link between him and George in Bill’s mind. Bill would like to try out the boy’s skateboard, but realizing he’ll just crash and hurt himself, he wisely changes his mind (he’s almost forty years old, and unlike the two handsome actors who play adult Bill in the TV miniseries and the 2019 film, he’s bald).

Wanting to go on the skateboard, with the risk of crashing, anticipates his final ride on his old bike, Silver, with Audra. Further linking the skateboard to the bike is how Bill is going to find Silver later in this very section.

He learns about a shop called Secondhand Rose, Secondhand Clothes, a filthy, dingy place, and here is where he finds Silver, in the window (page 778). When he’s about to ask the owner of the shop about the bike, those tongue-twisting old lines suddenly pop up in his head: “He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts.” (page 779) Seeing old Silver is also rather like seeing a ghost for Bill, so this must be a major factor in reviving the memory of this old rhyming couplet.

When Bill was a kid, he used to recite this rhyme as part of his speech therapy for ridding himself of his stammer. What’s curious about the words is how they include the idea of ‘seeing ghosts,’ something that should have always been triggering for little Bill…yet they helped cure his stutter.

In a similar vein, racing on the bike with Audra, as dangerous as it was, snaps her out of her catatonia. Perhaps a crash on the boy’s skateboard would have been good for Bill, too.

The point is that It is all about facing one’s fears in order to cure one’s trauma. One has to get hurt to get rid of hurt. This is what the duality of good and evil in the novel–its interconnected, dialectical nature–ultimately means.

We learn, incidentally, that the proprietor is gay, reminding us of Adrian Mellon and his murder (page 781). Bill buys the bike for twenty bucks, he calls Mike and asks if it will be OK to take the bike over to Mike’s garage so he can store it there. Mike agrees to it, and Bill takes it over there.

Mike is helping Bill fix up the bike, and at one point, a deck of playing cards (for attaching to the bike’s wheel) that Mike has just opened has two aces of spades; these two cards are also the only ones, after having scattered the deck all over the floor, to land face up (pages 788-789).

The ace of spades can symbolize many things, both positive and negative, but for the sake of this novel, it would seem that the negative meanings have far greater importance. It’s been called the Death Card, being associated with imminent death, bad fortune, disaster, hatred, war, and even the end of the world…which should remind us of the flooding in Derry, twice, and the…apocalyptic…rock fight. So the two cards are an omen.

There are two aces of spades seen in this deck because the Losers have to deal with It twice. That the card has both positive and negative symbolism also ties in with the theme of good and bad duality. It’s bad to face the terror of It, but it’s also good to do so in order to defeat It.

After attaching the playing cards to the bike’s rear wheel, then eating burgers that Mike has cooked for them, Bill brings up the rhyming couplet. Bill has written it down on a business card, and he’s had Mike read it, asking him if it means anything to him (pages 789-790). Mike remembers that Bill, as a kid, used to mumble the couplet to himself in an attempt to cure his stammer. Bill struggled with saying it properly back then, but he did at least once succeed.

He’s now frustrated that he can’t remember the precise moment when he successfully said it. We have here a case of repressed memory–which would normally be a repressed trauma–yet it’s also a move out of the traumatic, unutterable world of the Real and into the verbal, social world of the Symbolic.

“The ghosts”–representative of Bill’s trauma (i.e., Georgie’s ghost)–is fittingly at the end of the couplet. The saying of these words, presumably after having said all of the preceding ones without a stutter, would thus represent a fully successful recitation, progress–at the very least–in curing himself of his stutter. Saying that last word is symbolic of facing his fears, verbalizing his trauma.

His inability to remember his childhood success–that is, when it actually happened–means he can no longer make the moment real for himself, hence his hard banging of his fists on the picnic table in frustration (page 790). The forgetting is an unconscious resistance; sometimes we know when we need to face a trauma, but our unconscious forbids the confrontation out of how unbearable the pain will be. Still, the forgetting is frustrating because we know that we must confront the pain in order to be cured of it.

In this we once again note the good/bad duality. It’s good that the forgetting/resistance spares us the pain, but it’s also good to face the pain to be cured of it, and it’s bad to be denied that cure because of the forgetting.

Part IV is coming soon.

Stephen King, It, New York, Pocket Books, 1986