22 pages • 44 minutes read
Strawberry Spring
A 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
Indirect Characterization and Point of View
Though King provides few personal details about the narrator, he uses indirect characterization to create a well-rounded protagonist to whom readers can relate, at least on some levels. Indirect characterization can be defined as revealing a character’s personality through showing versus telling. Rather than explaining the kind of person the protagonist is, King reveals the narrator’s personality through his actions, private thoughts, and feelings. The story’s first-person point of view provides an opportunity for the narrator to speak for himself and make an impression on the reader.
As the story ends with a plot twist, the narrator’s characterization must mislead the reader to some degree so that the ending is a surprise. Horror fiction often relies on readers’ uncertainty about fact versus imagination, especially when a story contains the supernatural.
In “Strawberry Spring,” the narrator seems no different than his fellow students in how he reacts to the murders. The only clue to the narrator’s difference is his obsession with the fog and strawberry spring. A key aspect of indirect characterization is how the protagonist affects those around them, and the narrator’s roommate does not find the narrator’s attitude strange. When the roommate explains strawberry spring, the narrator dismisses it as “folk tales,” implying that he does not take it too seriously (189). While there is a moment during the conversation when the roommate expresses suspicion about the narrator, it quickly passes.
Shortly after their conversation, the narrator looks out the window and thinks “part of me was still out there, walking in the shadows where something dark was now in charge” (189). While cryptic, the comment does not raise an alarm for the reader because the narrator is in his room studying for an exam. The narrator’s character is his alibi, and it holds until the end when he is forced to confront the truth.
Psychological Horror
As a subgenre of horror, psychological horror uses the characters’ mental and emotional states as the primary source of fear. Uncertainty, paranoia, and distrust pervade the psychological horror story. A horrific crime or disturbing event may or may not be part of the story; sometimes the object of fear exists—or seems to exist—only in the protagonist’s mind.
“Strawberry Spring” straddles two overlapping genres. It begins as a classic murder mystery or “whodunnit.” In murder mysteries, especially those that feature serial killers, the horror derives from an unknown killer who commits crimes, often in a gruesome manner, while eluding the police. The primary plot catalysts in a whodunnit are the murders that occur and the clues that lead or mislead the detective. The protagonist of a whodunnit is usually a professional or amateur detective, who may or may not have a personal relationship with the killer. Narrative tension is created by the chase and the question of whether the murderer will be brought to justice.
“Strawberry Spring” diverges from this pattern in two important ways. First, the police prove ineffective in apprehending the killer. They make false arrests, mistake a student for a corpse, and fail to elicit meaningful information from witnesses. Second, the protagonist is not a detective. For most of the story, the narrator is a bystander, a student who is trying to live his life amid disturbing events. He does not insinuate himself into the investigation.
Because the protagonist’s mental state provides the key to the plot, the horror in the story is primarily psychological. King creates a mood of suspense because, without an effective official investigation, the students begin to suspect each other. The overwhelming presence of police on campus, especially because the story takes place during the Vietnam War, ratchets up the tension. The fog of strawberry spring provides cover for the killer and makes it difficult to determine anyone’s identity.
In the end, the reader is forced to confront the horror that the narrator committed the murders without realizing it. Is he experiencing delusions? Does he have psychopathic traits? Has he been lying to the readers? To himself? Readers feel uneasy because they realize they have been duped by an unreliable narrator. This realization creates an impulse to conduct their own investigation by returning to the story to look for clues they may have missed—exactly the intended effect of psychological horror.
Personification
Personification is the attribution of human or human-like characteristics to something nonhuman. Personification in literature is mainly of two types. The first uses figurative language to add depth or poetic feeling to a description. In the second, a protagonist develops an emotional attachment to an animal, object, or abstract entity that elicits strongly positive or negative feelings. In such cases, the protagonist’s mental or emotional state, and their relationship to the personified object, are key aspects of the story.
The protagonist in “Strawberry Spring” personifies the fog to the point of eroticization. The intensity of the eroticization increases in proportion to the number of murders. At first, the fog drifts in “like cigarette smoke” (183). After the first murder, when the narrator walks at night, he describes the fog as a promiscuous woman: “[It] came again that night, not on little cat’s feet, but in an improper silent sprawl” (184). Before the third murder, the narrator fantasizes that the fog is the killer’s female accomplice and that the school is caught “between them […], part of a marriage that had been consummated in blood” (188). In the present day, the narrator remembers the “lovely creeping fog” and begins to suspect himself as the murderer (191).
The narrator’s romanticizing of the fog stands in opposition to the way he brutalizes and objectifies women. He does not even seem to care that his wife is crying as he writes his account, and her suspicion that he spent the previous night with another woman suggests that he has done so before.
Unlock all 22 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 8,800+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features:
Related Titles
By Stephen King
