Billy Summers

Content Warning: This section references violence, including the murder of a child abuse, and racism.

“Billy Summers sits in the hotel lobby, waiting for his ride. It’s Friday noon. Although he’s reading a digest-sized comic book called Archie’s Pals ’n’ Gals, he’s thinking about Émile Zola, and Zola’s third novel, his breakthrough, Thérèse Raquin.”

The opening sentences offer readers their first glimpse of the eponymous antihero, Billy Summers. The first thing that King establishes about him is that there is a disjuncture between the way he presents himself to the world and his interior life. This hints at The Fluidity of Identity and Self, as it raises questions about who the “real” Billy is—his external demeanor and actions or his inner world. The passage also links these questions to The Relationship Between Readers and Writers, associating each side of Billy with a different kind of reading material (though the novel will trouble the distinction between pop fiction and “serious” literature just as it troubles the notion of stable identity).

“‘Is it a bad person?’

Nick laughs, shakes his head, and looks at Billy with real affection.

‘Always the same question with you.’

Billy nods.

The dumb self might be a shuck, but this is true: he only does bad people.”

This quotation highlights the short, to-the-point dialogue of questions, answers, and short declarative phrases that characterizes the way characters talk. There is an undercurrent of unspoken thoughts, however, that are made explicit through free indirect discourse, in which the third-person narrative reflects the thoughts of the central character. The passage further develops the interplay between Billy’s different selves, illustrating how he uses the naivete of his “dumb self” to express genuine moral concerns.