34 pages • 1 hour read
Stephen King1408
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Setting
Content Warning: The source material features discussions of suicide, self-harm, and distressing imagery, which is discussed in this section.
Setting is one of the most prominent elements in King’s body of work; his stories and novels often take place in memorable places like the Overlook Hotel or Salem’s Lot. “1408” is no exception, as King spends much of the first section of the story characterizing the Hotel Dolphin as the kind of establishment that would fit into New York’s Upper East Side while keeping one foot in a glamorous, worldly past. The rest of the hotel stands in contrast to room 1408, which is outdated, typically vacant, and plain-looking on its face.
The strange events that occur within room 1408 seem to hint at the idea that the room is not only malevolent, but conscious. It appears to have a certain level of agency that enables it to antagonize Mike. At one point, it responds to Mike’s falsified anecdote about his brother by transforming the doorknob menu into a woodcut image of the very thing Mike has described. In this way, it functions as a kind of character whose precise motivations, schemes, and limitations are left obscure to the reader.
1408 is also responsible for moving the plot of the story along from the second section onward. Mike spends much of this section observing details in the room to establish them for the reader, and in turn, the room spends the same amount of time altering those very same details to convince Mike that something is wrong.
Foreshadowing
Before Enslin enters 1408, Olin provides him with a rundown of all the supernatural occurrences that have happened in the room, such as electronic failure, emotional harm, and physical disability. Olin also recounts the history of deaths in the room, many of which were suicides.
Olin’s anecdotes help to establish an expectation of what will happen to Mike when he does enter the room. Mike even compares Olin to the classic horror movie trope of the “gloomy old butler who tries to warn the young married couple away from Castle Doom” (376), a stock character whose very purpose was to foreshadow the terrifying events to come. Nevertheless, Olin’s warning fulfills itself. Mike is unlikely to encounter ghosts during his stay in the room, but he will experience sensations that may put his life at great risk.
When the second section of the story begins, King uses foreshadowing once again to renew tensions, informing the reader that Mike’s minicorder survives his brief stay, albeit in a ruined state. In doing so, King invites the reader to wonder whether Mike survives his time in 1408, what causes the damage to the minicorder, and most importantly, what transpired in the room to bring about the minicorder’s strange contents.
Allusion
In this story, the characters occasionally reference other famous horror stories, as well as horror film tropes. Mike compares the serialization of his first book to the success of Frankenstein, which led to its sequel, Bride of Frankenstein. During their conversation, Olin references Charles Dickens’s famous ghost story A Christmas Carol, which tells the story of an old miser who comes to believe in the meaning of Christmas after an encounter with three spirits.
King does this to evoke the reader’s sense of what might happen in these kinds of stories and draw indirect comparisons to what happens in “1408.” It also serves as a way for Mike to maintain his grasp on reality, as he compares his observations in the room to phenomena that he’s seen in popular horror series and films, such as House on Haunted Hill and The Twilight Zone.
Mood
King crafts an unsettling atmosphere to sustain and heighten tension in the story. On a basic level, King invests some of this mood into vivid descriptions and detailed reactions from Mike. The first thing Mike experiences is the shifting of the doors, which are described as being “crooked” (385). When the door slants for the second time, Mike experiences seasickness. This gives the reader a sense of how unnerving the transformation appears from Mike’s perspective.
Mike observes further transformations in the room’s paintings and room service menu. In these two instances, the transformations morph the objects into disturbing, violent images. As his stay continues, Mike experiences other distortions, such as the floor softening beneath his feet, the chandelier sagging, and the wall bulging open to reveal an inexplicable beast. The fact that these transformations seem to occur before Mike’s eyes—without a clear explanation or reason—intensifies the foreboding air that marks his stay in the room.
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