A Different Take On Stephen King

As nine-year-old Trisha McFarland stumbled away from the hiking trail, simply to escape the bickering between her mom and brother and also to relieve herself, she had no clue what the consequences of her one small, innocent decision would be. Turns out, it would be a decision that would risk her life and yet once you have made the decision, there is no going back. In Stephen King’s novel, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, King invites us to walk alongside Trisha as she learns the harsh reality of what it is like to be lost in the woods. While offering its readers gripping entertainment, this book also provides an interesting take on the issue of free will and determinism, which we have been exploring over the past few weeks. It is interesting for me to note that while I could take many different interpretations of this novel regarding the free will/determinism debate, it is, again, compatibilism that seems to sum it up best for me.

Now I know many would argue that this story is ripe with determinism as a reoccurring motif—which I most definitely can see—but we would be doing ourselves a disservice if we said that compatibilism is not just as strongly represented throughout this story. From the moment Trisha steps off the path, she makes a deliberate choice and it is the first of many that determines the progression of this story. These choices build upon each other in the same way that chemical reactions do, and like all experiments, when you add in a new variable, things are likely to change.

Throughout this story, nature can be seen as the independent variable. In other words, its variation does not depend on any other factor, such as Trisha’s safety. That being true, we can view Trisha’s decision making—her free will—as the dependent variable. Its value inevitably depends on her surroundings, thus prompting her to keep going through a nasty marsh or to stop at a clearing where there is an old truck that she can sleep in to shield herself from the rain. Furthermore, I am not saying that something like cosmological determinism is not at work in this story, but I am asking you to reconsider how you label it when you take into account Trisha’s actions throughout this story. While Trisha could not determine when and where she would run into food/water sources, she did determine the direction that had brought her there. Not to mention, it was upon her free will that she chose to drink the stream water and ration her food the way she did.

Another great example of compatibilism, and probably the most notable in the story, is near the end when Trisha chooses to face her enemy, the God of the Lost. All this time, she has been traveling through the woods with a sense that something has been watching her and now she stands face to face with the beast. Clutching her Sony Walkman as if she were Tom Gordon about to throw the closing pitch for the Red Sox, Trisha makes the bold decision to be still before chucking the device at what readers can presume was a bear. This truly was the closing decision of her acting on what little free will she had left, but I would not say it was the only attempt at free will we saw throughout this story. That being said, it seems to me that compatibilism is the most appropriate stance to take in this story. As human beings, we cannot control the forces in our path, but we can control how we react to them.