Gerald's Game

Prince is arguably a character in the story, as he is anthropomorphized, or made human-like, by King’s use of interior narration on Prince’s thoughts and reactions. However, he serves more as a symbol of both resilience and violence in the novel. These two factors coincide in the combined concept of survival and natural instincts, and the details of Prince’s perspective often lend insight into both Jessie’s struggle to escape the handcuffs and her perception of men and toxic masculinity. A key factor in understanding Prince’s relevance to the story is “his” references to Jessie as a “bitchmaster,” which is meant to be taken as a reference to the practice of referring to female dogs as “bitches.” However, King’s choice of words also underpins a critical element in the misogyny of the toxic male characters who dominate the text. The title of “bitchmaster” does not indicate a means of deference, as the word “master” does in Prince’s interior narration, but instead denotes a means of diminution. Prince is not afraid of Jessie because she is not a real “master,” and so she does not present the same level of danger that a man would. In this case, King uses a seemingly technical term to convey a myriad of intangible social constructs, the chief of which involves certain male characters’ tendency to perceive women as being less capable or intelligent.

Prince himself is a male dog, and he has been abandoned by his adoptive family as they left the lake for the autumn. He has since been roving the area in search of food and shelter, and he stumbles upon Jessie’s predicament because of the smells of food and blood that he detects from the house. Once inside, he consumes portions of Gerald’s corpse out of severe hunger. Jessie understands this survival instinct, though it disturbs her at first. Prince’s overwhelming, “instinctual” desire to eat Gerald’s corpse is designed to be a more visceral mirroring of the desires that King’s male characters feel in sexual situations. For example, Gerald is arguably pushed by his arousal to assault Jessie, and Tom is likewise led to abuse his daughter. The key difference, though, and the reason why Prince is a key symbol in the text, is that Prince does not have the rational capacity to restrain himself from consuming Gerald, whereas the male characters in the novel are fully capable of restraining themselves from perpetuating abuse; they simply choose not to resist such urges. They absolutely have the rational capacity to stop themselves from assaulting women and children, but instead they choose to give in to their arousal.

At the same time, Prince’s desire to survive mirrors Jessie’s, and she shares a common point with Prince later in the novel. Prince takes a moment to transition from seeing Gerald as a “master” to viewing the corpse as food, and Jessie follows a similar pattern in which she expresses less and less concern for Gerald as a person. Initially, she is disturbed that her husband is dead, then that the dog is eating his corpse, but, finally, she steps on his corpse and feels nothing for who he used to be. As Jessie is pushed closer to her breaking point, the goal of escape and survival becomes far stronger than her ties to the emotions of attachment that she might have felt earlier in her captivity.