The Long Walk

“She felt that she had been too dry, too tired, or maybe just too taken up with her older sorrows to halt her son’s madness in its seedling stage—to halt it before the cumbersome machinery of the State with its guards in khaki and its computer terminals had taken over, binding himself more tightly to its insensate self with each passing day, until yesterday, when the lid had come down with a final bang.”

Garraty contemplates his mother’s sense of guilt over his joining the Walk. The personification of the State emphasizes the government’s authority and dominance over people’s lives. Throughout the text, Stephen King juxtaposes instances of personification with dehumanization, a terrifying combination that lends agency to objects and entities while simultaneously stripping them of conscience.

“Garraty was getting a firsthand lesson in the psychology of the grapevine. Someone found something out, and suddenly it was all over. Rumors were created by mouth-to-mouth respiration. It looks like rain. Chances are it’s going to rain. It’s gonna rain pretty soon. The guy with the radio says it’s gonna shit potatoes pretty quick. But it was funny how often the grapevine was right. And when the word came back that someone was slowing up, that someone was in trouble, the grapevine was always right.”

The personification of “the grapevine” lends credibility to the rumor mill. The boys’ reliance on the telephone-like means of communication emphasizes their youthful vulnerability, and the metaphor of “mouth-to-mouth respiration” shows the boys’ desperate attempts to use communication to leverage their own survival. The boys negotiate the tension between relying on isolation and relying on friendship.

“Just go on dancing with me like this forever, Garraty, and I’ll never tire. We’ll scrape our shoe on the stars and hang upside down from the moon.”

McVries follows this pronouncement with a blown kiss, and Garraty isn’t sure what to make of it. McVries’s sexual ambiguity often causes Garraty to feel off-kilter, uncomfortable as he realizes that he enjoys his friend’s presence and reciprocates some of his feelings. McVries’s description of the Walk as a dance demonstrates a survival method on which he often relies: By trying to find value or entertainment in the Walk, he manages to keep himself sane.