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Part 3, Chapters 34-48
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Misery, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Addiction, Compulsion, and Obsession
Fiction, Reality, and Coping
Suffering, Justice, and the Human Condition
Control and Entrapment
Summary
Analysis
The chapter opens with the same incoherent speech Paul heard when he was in the haze after his accident. In the present, it has been nine months since Paul escaped Annie’s house. He has a new apartment and prosthesis, but drinks too much and does not write at all. His publishing team fast-tracked Misery’s Return and are begging him for a memoir about his captivity. Paul does not know if he will ever be able to write such an account. He misses Annie’s good drugs. Reaching his apartment, he hallucinates Annie attacking him with the axe, screaming “Rinse!” He tries to tell her she can read the book now, but she cuts off his head.
Returning to the hazy speech of Paul’s first encounter with Annie indicates he is still haunted by memories of his ordeal. His inability to write suggests that even his creativity has been stolen by the memory of what Annie forced him to do. Paul’s belief that writing a memoir would involve “fictionalizing” himself highlights how all creative endeavors exist separately from reality, even if they are based on that reality. His longing for Annie’s Novril shows that addiction to a substance does not disappear just because that substance is no longer readily available. Despite having survived, then, Paul finds himself haunted by traumatic flashbacks and unable to partake in the compulsive behaviors (writing and drugs) that once made his suffering bearable.
Themes
Paul understands that this encounter is make-believe. Annie was not an immortal goddess after all. Though Annie managed to escape the guest room and reach the barn, she died there of a fractured skull, clutching a chainsaw. Like Misery, Paul feels she rests uneasily in her grave, tormenting his psyche. On his way home, Paul saw a boy pushing a skunk in a shopping cart, and it gave him an idea for a story. At home, he begins to write, ignoring the persistent hallucinations of Annie. Finding he can still fall into the hole in the paper and find the story there, Paul picks up speed, crying as he writes.
Paul attempts to distance himself from his trauma by comparing his ordeal to fiction. Annie is not the all-controlling deity he imagined her to be, and she is no longer able to hurt him. In likening her to Misery, Paul admits that Annie—fictional or real, dead or alive—still holds power over his psyche, making him feel trapped in his life. In the end, Paul is able to write again—a sign he’s beginning to heal. In this way, the novel ends by illustrating how obsessions that help people cope with reality (to a greater degree than they cause suffering) can actually be a means of survival.
Themes
