The Talisman

“[F]or a moment the gull was looking at him, its eyes a deadly black, confirming every horrible truth: fathers die, mothers die, uncles die even if they went to Yale and look as solid as bank walls in their three-piece Savile Row suits. Kids die too, maybe…and at the end all there may be is the stupid, unthinking scream of living tissue.”

The gull that mocks Jack gives him an existential moment of dreadful reflection. As it eats the clam, Jack envisions himself and the world as the prey, and the gull as the death that waits for everyone. Death reduces everything to the same state: suffering, deteriorating flesh.

“Jacky, you can never be too thin or too rich.”

Jack’s mother recycles a Hollywood adage that is only half-joking in her case. Her identity is crystallized in her former B movie celebrity status. As an actress, she made good money and was adored for her beauty and figure. As she wastes away in the Alhambra, she grows dangerously thin, and no amount of money can save her life.

“There comes times, you know what I mean, you know more than you think you know. One hell of a lot more.”

Speedy tries to convince Jack that he should reconsider his ideas about the Daydreams. Speedy knows that Jack has abilities that are unique to him, and that he often knows things he has no reason to know. Jack agrees with him and experiences a flood of memories that prove what Speedy is saying.

“There’s only one of you. You special.”

Speedy foreshadows the eventual reveal of Jack’s unique nature. Jack is able to defeat Orris and find the Talisman precisely because Jack does not have a Twinner. When he flips between worlds, he remains himself, which gives him an advantage over Twinners that must share a consciousness as they traverse the worlds. He focuses his powers and energy through one, unshared perception.

“He could not say goodbye to these three rooms as he could to a house he had loved: hotel rooms accepted departures emotionlessly.”

Jack knows that the Alhambra is an escape for his mother and could even be the place where she dies. When Jack leaves the hotel, he can’t muster any nostalgia for the place. The Black Hotel in Point Venuti will invert this idea of an emotionless hotel. It is filled with evil emotions and when Jack leaves it, it is with a sense of victory and joy.

“His partner had never played to win, not seriously; he had been encumbered by sentimental notions of loyalty and honor, corrupted by the stuff you told kids to get them halfway civilized before you finally tore the blindfold off their eyes.”

Sloat thinks about Phil Sawyer and his weaknesses. Sloat is not a loyal friend, or a sentimentalist. He knows that his son Richard may be a necessary sacrifice in the pursuit of his ambitions, but that does not deter him. Loyalty and sentiment are childish notions for him, impediments to power, progress, and ambition.

“Boys are bad. All boys are bad. It’s axiomatic.”

The novel does not provide Osmond’s backstory, but his refrain that all boys are innately bad suggests disturbing foundational events in his youth. In Jack’s world, as Sunlight Gardener, he founds the Sunlight Home, which ostensibly allows him to correct wayward boys while subjecting them to his abuse and cruelty. If he truly believes all boys are bad, then he can justify any corrective measures he can imagine.

“You’re too young to be a man, but you can at least pretend, can’t you? You look like a kicked dog!”

Parkus is Speedy Parker’s Twinner and serves the same function in the Territories as Speedy does in Jack’s world: to set Jack on his journey. However, Parkus does not have the same luxury of gentility that Speedy does. In Parkus’s world, Sloat is an immediate, looming threat. He must snap Jack to attention quickly and effectively before sending him west.

“He cried because all safety and reason seemed to have departed from the world. Loneliness was here, a reality; but in this situation, insanity was also too much of a possibility.”

After Jack escapes from the trees in the Territories, he admits to himself that everything Speedy said was true. Nothing that Jack believed about reality is indisputable at this point. This realization makes him feel a combination of loneliness and mental instability that he will have to overcome quickly, especially during the stretches where he has no traveling companion. If Jack cannot distinguish reality from fantasy, he worries about losing his mental foundation.

“Everything has consequences, and some of those consequences might be on the uncomfortable side.”

Phil talks with Sloat about the consequences of their actions. As they flip back and forth between the Territories, events in one world influence those in the other. Sloat doesn’t care about this if he can continue gathering power and wealth. Phil, on the other hand, is cautious. He cares about the innocents in both realities and wants to proceed with caution; the same caution that makes Sloat see him as a hindrance.

"I believe a three-week squabble over there in some way sparked off a war here that lasted six years and killed millions of people."

Phil reminds Sloat about the King who was assassinated in the Territories. It happened on September 1, 1939, the day that Germany invaded Poland in Phil’s reality. There is no way to gauge the severity of the consequences that one world will have on the other. Phil does not want his ambitions to result in deaths, but Sloat cares nothing for the potential effects of their actions. He is willing to let millions die to pursue his own agenda.

“God pounds all his nails sooner or later. And what happens to little people when they meddle into the affairs of the great is that they get hurt.”

The farmer tells Jack that he does not want to hear any more about his quest. He understands that he is an insignificant piece in a game played by powerful people. He realizes that Jack has strategic value to Orris, and he is unwilling to help him further, no matter how much he might want to.

“Fret not thyself in any wise to do evil, for evildoers shall be cut off.”

Sunlight Gardener’s hypocrisy is never on greater display than during his sermons at the Sunlight Home. He preaches against evil while also indulging in sadistic appetites. He warns the boys that evildoers will be cut off, while perpetrating evil and cutting his wards off from their families and society.

“I kept my herd safe.”

Jack mourns Wolf after he leaves the horrors of the Sunlight Home. Wolf sacrificed himself to save Jack. He considered Jack part of his herd, and treated him as family, just as he did with his animals. Wolf also protected Jack out of a sense of duty; he believed that a Wolf who does not protect his herd is damned, scarcely better than a Wolf who eats from his own herd.

“I don’t think I’ll ever cure cancer, no. But that’s not even the point. The point is finding out how things work. The point is that things actually really do work in an orderly way, in spite of how it looks, and you can find out about it.”

Only an orderly universe is tolerable to Richard. He does not believe that life without mystery or magic is dull. He takes meaning from figuring out natural laws of order and understanding the world and its functions in practical terms. Richard enjoys the exploration of rationality, rather than the fearsome thrills of metaphysical uncertainty.

“Jack had finished William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, feeling hot and cold and trembly all over—both exalted and frightened, most of all wishing what he always wished when the story was most particularly good—that it didn’t have to stop, that it could just roll on and on, the way that life did (only life was always so much more boring and so much more pointless than stories).”

In terms of fiction and fantasy, Jack is the opposite of Richard. Jack prefers stories to real life, because they often have more satisfying endings, and more exhilarating adventures. Good fiction heightens Jack’s enjoyment of life, while simultaneously threatening Richard’s worldview. For Jack, a good story cannot be too long.

“He has, quite simply, Had Enough, Forever.”

Richard represents skepticism in the novel. Whenever he confronts something fantastical, whether it is a novel or an apparition from the Territories, he rejects it as impossible. He has ‘Had Enough’ of uncertainty. This stance robs Richard of a love of fiction, but it also protects him from confronting truths that he finds unbearable.

“I can bear to tell you no more— only that they comforted each other as well as they could, and, as you probably know from your own bitter experience, that is never quite good enough.”

As Jack comforts Richard during the time of his greatest distress, the narrator intrudes into the story—the only time in the book that this happens. The narrator addresses the reader and appeals to the reader’s experiences to commiserate with Jack and Richard’s plight. King often does this in other novels containing the idea of multiple worlds and realities, perhaps as a reminder that the reader inhabits one of many possible universes.

“A universe of worlds, a dimensional macrocosm of worlds—and in all of them one thing that was always the same; one unifying force that was undeniably good, even if it now happened to be imprisoned in an evil place; the Talisman, axle of all possible worlds.”

The authors clarify that the Talisman is, by nature, a force for good. It contains an innate goodness that is indivisible and incorruptible. The Talisman can be constrained by evil, but not even a corrupt ownership can change its nature. In the wrong hands, the Talisman is not evil, but cannot be used for good, or to help others.

“We in the Black Hotel care only for the Talisman—the nexus of all possible worlds.”

The voices in the Black Hotel mutter truths about the Talisman to Jack. The word “nexus” refers to the Talisman as the centermost link to all possible worlds. Therefore, the evil forces in the Black Hotel value it so highly. Power over the Talisman can potentially extend to power over all dimensions and worlds. In the case of the hotel’s evil, power over the Talisman could mean infinite evil.

“He never forgot that sweet, violent feeling of having touched some great adventure, of having looked for a moment at some beautiful white light that was, in fact, every color of the rainbow.”

As Jack travels east after claiming the Talisman, he reminisces about the journey. For all the horrors of the adventure, Jack ultimately remembers the purity and glory of the Talisman above all else. His experiencing seeing every color of the rainbow is a microcosmic representation of his trip, during which he glimpsed many different realities. 

“You don’t own a thing unless you can give it up.”

When Jack relinquishes the Talisman, he knows that he will no longer possess it once his journey ends. He sees the wisdom in lessening his attachment to it, however. Jack demonstrates his mastery and ownership of the Talisman by sacrificing his claim to it on behalf of others. He proves that he possessed the Talisman by giving it up.

“Everything goes away, Jack Sawyer, like the moon. Everything comes back, like the moon.”

When Jack finds that Wolf survived, he is overjoyed. The Talisman is at the heart of endless cycles that affect a multitude of worlds. Creatures and their alternate selves die and are reborn endlessly, like Wolf, and like the cycles of the moon. This is both cause for joy and sorrow. Death will always be inevitable, but so will life, which mitigates the harshness of loss.