72 pages • 2 hours read
The Stand
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Themes
Building a Society
The plague virus has killed over 99% of the human population. This devastation offers a unique opportunity for the survivors to rebuild their civilization from the ground up. The Stand ponders the question of what sort of society is best suited to ensure the happiness of all its citizens. Glen is the character most closely aligned with speculations of this kind. He says, “Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home” (458).
Glen and Stu are both deeply suspicious of the trappings of society. Population increase demands a more complex bureaucracy to govern it. With complexity comes corruption. The narrative endorses the idea of a village council as the ideal way for a society to function. This mechanism becomes possible while Boulder only has several hundred inhabitants but grows increasingly impractical once that population swells into the thousands. Stu and Frannie solve the problem for themselves by leaving the Free Zone, but this doesn’t resolve the fundamental dilemma. Does population growth inevitably lead to corruption?
The novel suggests that there are two types of people in the world—those who attracted to freedom and those attracted to order. The former feel motivation by love, while the latter operate by fear. Each type will prefer a different sort of government—Flagg’s totalitarian regime or Free Zone democracy. It’s important to remember that Flagg didn’t compel the majority of plague survivors to follow him. Most of the residents of new Las Vegas are decent people who want structure and security in a world fallen into chaos. The dark man is willing to provide these things in exchange for abject obedience. The novel implies that Flagg can only exist because of the darkness within the human heart that calls him forth and reanimates him in troubled times when people reject democracy in favor of dictatorship.
The Persistence of Evil
While The Stand doesn’t explicitly endorse a belief in a god or a devil, the characters of the book illustrate these two principles quite clearly and divide between the two extremes represented by these supernatural figures. To some extent, Abagail symbolizes God, while Flagg represents Satan, though neither one is more than a physical representation of the concepts of good and evil.
As presented in the novel, Flagg is more than human even though he walks the world as a mortal man. He can levitate and can project his consciousness into the minds of animals or even his all-seeing Eye. However, his consciousness isn’t omnipotent. His form dissolves periodically and assumes another shape elsewhere, as evidenced by his appearance half a world away at the end of the book. Flagg himself forgets his identity periodically. It costs him an effort to remember his name, his age, or the context in which he finds himself rematerialized.
The book ends with a final scene in which Flagg creates a new band of converts in a primitive tribe. The implication is that the evil he represents always finds a way to reconstitute itself. Significantly, the principle of good embodied by Abagail doesn’t undergo a similar metamorphosis. After her death, she disappears from the story altogether. The Stand suggests that good is all-pervasive and eternal, while evil blooms and dies like a weed. Nadine tells Flagg, “Everything you made here is falling apart, and why not? The effective half-life of evil is always relatively short” (1165). When viewed in this light, the two concepts of good and evil don’t represent polar opposites. Rather, good is the stable basis of all creation, while evil appears and disappears as a cyclic annoyance to challenge the status quo.
Taking a Stand
Given the overwhelming length of the novel, it is surprising that the ultimate confrontation between the forces of good and evil only takes three pages to describe. This anticlimactic ending only makes sense if one views the nature of evil as something other than fearsome. In the minds of all the citizens of the Free Zone, Randall Flagg is the terrifying bogeyman who haunts their dreams. The refugees in new Las Vegas are equally terrified even though few of them have ever seen the dark man’s face. Their fears come from rumors of his powers more than by an actual demonstration of them.
When Abagail sends Stu, Glen, Larry, and Ralph to confront Flagg, she tells them to take nothing but the clothes on their backs. They must walk rather than drive. All these tactics are meant to underscore the absolute vulnerability of the four men, and this vulnerability represents their greatest power. They are walking to almost certain death without attempting to defend themselves in any way. Their actions demonstrate a subtle triumph over fear.
In contrast, Flagg rules his kingdom with fear tactics. He even intimidates the inhabitants of the Free Zone by doing the same. Four men walking unarmed into his camp are tacitly demonstrating that they may be afraid, but fear doesn’t rule their actions. They don’t need to fight fire with fire. All they need to do is take a stand against fear itself in order to defeat it. The forces of darkness dissolve before those who will not cower before them.
When Flagg confronts Glen in his cell, the prisoner collapses in a fit of laugher. He is amazed at the monstrous proportion Flagg has achieved in the minds of everyone.
‘You’re nothing!’ Glen said, wiping his streaming eyes and still chuckling. ‘Oh pardon me … it’s just that we were all so frightened … we made such a business out of you … I’m laughing as much at our own foolishness as at your regrettable lack of substance’ (1228).
Even though Glen and his companions die to attain that awareness, their stand is a refusal to bend to fear. In the world of The Stand, that’s all it takes to make the dark man disappear.
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