Suffering, Justice, and the Human Condition Theme Analysis

The pain wasn’t tidal. That was the lesson of the dream which was really a memory. The pain only appeared to come and go. The pain was like the piling, sometimes covered and sometimes visible, but always there. When the pain wasn’t harrying him through the deep stone grayness of his cloud, he was dumbly grateful, but he was no longer fooled—it was still there, waiting to return.

“But characters in stories DO NOT just slip away! God takes us when He thinks it’s time and a writer is God to the people in a story, he made them up just like God made us up and no one can get hold of God to make him explain, all right, okay, but as far as Misery goes, I’ll tell you one thing you dirty bird, I’ll tell you that God just happens to have a couple of broken legs and God just happens to be in MY house eating MY food…and…”

She went blank then.

“So you just sit there,” she said, lips pulled back in that grinning rictus, “and you think about who is in charge here, and all the things I can do to hurt you if you behave badly or try to trick me. You sit there and you scream if you want to, because no one can hear you. No one stops here because they all know Annie Wilkes is crazy, they all know what she did, even if they did find me innocent.”

“When he found that parachute under the seat, it was fair. Maybe not all that realistic, but fair.”

He thought about this, startled—her occasional sharp insights never failed to startle him—and decided it was true. Fair and realistic might be synonyms in the best of all possible worlds, but if so, this was not that world.

She suddenly leaped at him with that limber ferocity, and although he felt certain she meant to hurt him as she had before, possibly because she couldn’t get at the dirty birdie of a scriptwriter who had cheated Rocket Man out of the Hudson before it went over the cliff, he did not move at all—he could see the seeds of her current instability in the window of the past she had just opened for him, but he was also awed by it—the injustice she felt was, in spite of its childishness, completely, inarguably real.

“How its heart beats! How it struggles to get away! As we do, Paul. As we do. We think we know so much, but we really don’t know any more than a rat in a trap—a rat with a broken back that thinks it still wants to live.”

[…]

“I’ll get my gun, Paul, shall I? Maybe the next world is better. For rats and people both—not that there’s much difference between the two.”

Annie had killed them because—

“Because they were rats in a trap,” he whispered.

Poor things. Poor poor things.

Sure. That was it. In Annie’s view all the people in the world were divided into three groups: brats, poor poor things…and Annie.

“Sometimes, the native workers stole diamonds. […] And do you know what the British did to them if they got caught before they could get over Oranjerivier and into Boer country?”

“Killed them, I suppose,” he said, eyes still closed.

“Oh, no! That would have been like junking an expensive car just because of a broken spring. If they caught them they made sure that they could go on working…but they also made sure they would never run again. The operation was called hobbling, Paul, and that is what I’m going to do to you. For my own safety…and yours as well. Believe me, you need to be protected from yourself.”

Of course he would ask Annie for nothing, much less demand. Once there had been a man who would at least have asked. A man who had been in a great deal more pain, a man who had nothing to hold onto, not even this shitty book. That man would have asked. Hurt or not, that man had had the guts to at least try to stand up to Annie Wilkes.

He had been that man, and he supposed he ought to be ashamed, but that man had two big advantages over this one: that man had had two feet…and two thumbs.

Misery, of course. That was the thread that ran through everything, but, true thread or false, it was so goddam silly.

As a common noun it meant pain, usually lengthy and often pointless; as a proper one it meant a character and a plot, the latter most assuredly lengthy and pointless, but one which would nonetheless end very soon. Misery ran through the last four (or maybe it was five) months of his life, all right, plenty of Misery, Misery day in and Misery day out, but surely that was too simple, surely—

Oh no, Paul. Nothing is simple about Misery. Except that you owe her your life, such as that may be…because you turned out to be Scheherazade after all, didn’t you?

[…]

What you keep overlooking, because it’s so obvious, is that you were—are—also Scheherazade to yourself.

Was he going to keep his mouth shut because there were two chances in ten that she would off these two as well if he opened it?

The guilt stabbed quickly again and was gone. The answer to that was also no. It would be nice to credit himself with such selfless motives, but it wasn’t the truth. The fact was simple: he wanted to take care of Annie Wilkes himself. They could only put you in jail, bitch, he thought. I know how to hurt you.

But his ideas about God—like his ideas about so many things, had changed. They had changed in Africa. In Africa, he had discovered that there was not just one God but many, and some were more than cruel—they were insane, and that changed all. Cruelty, after all, was understandable. With insanity, however, there was no arguing.

If his Misery were truly dead, as he had come to fear, he intended to go up on the foredeck and throw himself over the rail. He had always known and accepted the fact that the gods were hard; he had no desire, however, to live in a world where the gods were insane.

In a book, all would have gone according to plan…but life was so fucking untidy—what could you say for an existence where some of the most crucial conversations of your life took place when you needed to take a shit, or something? An existence where there weren’t even any chapters?

That was all in the past, though. Annie Wilkes was in her grave. But, like Misery Chastain, she rested there uneasily. In his dreams and waking fantasies, he dug her up again and again. You couldn’t kill the goddess. Temporarily dope her with bourbon, maybe, but that was all.