(Spoilers throughout)
I’ve never read any Stephen King before so decided to give it a go. World building was lovely, characters were pretty interesting, tone was very dark throughout, suicides, rapes etc. I wasn’t a huge fan of when it took a supernatural turn halfway through and everyone had seance dreams, but a lot of the plot made sense; characters showing up where they should etc.
Then you have the final scene where Larry and Ralph are ‘offering themselves up’ to Randy Flagg, lambs to the slaughter, the chains and cages subtly representing crucifixion.
So: Randy makes a ball of blue lightning “the size of a ping pong ball” that gorily kills the Hector guy who pipes up. Then it carries on into the sky. Trash can shows up with an a-bomb (that was hilarious btw, I loved how he was crazily destroyed by radiation poisoning). Then that *same* ball of blue lightning turns into ‘the hand of god’ and detonates the nuke?
Even real-world logistics of detonating a nuke aside (I assume you need codes or there are a billion safeguards) I dont really get the logistics of the blue lightning, the ‘hand of god’.
1) why is it the same blue lightning Randall made? Was it like a spell-too powerful-gone-wrong trope? That doesn’t make sense as it turns into god. Why doesn’t god manifest as something else more distinct from Randall’s spell?
2) was god guiding the trash can man? He really carried almost the entire conflict against Randall Flagg, with the heroes doing nothing but walk over there
3) the ending is a *literal* deus-ex-machina. Is that so obvious that it’s.. kind of a comment of the Deus-ex-machina device in general?
Or was it not a clever planned commentary, and was it just King rushing the ending?
All in all it felt rushed and unsatisfying. Anyone else’s thoughts are appreciated
Thanks for reading
Sabre
by SabreToothSandHopper
29 Comments
Hope this isn’t a spoiler but that is how almost every King book ends.
Hero shoots the monster’s main henchman with a gun and then some totally unexplained deus ex magicka comes out of nowhere and kills the monster.
I think King just needed to end the book and tacked that weird ending on. It ruins the book in my opinion.
King is known for having unplanned endings. I’m fairly sure that he said in his On Writing book that he doesn’t plan much of anything. His writing is spontaneous/off the cuff.
I think… I think it went like this.
It was always God. >!Even Flagg is an agent of God. God had decided to purge humanity again. The one rule apparently was that no one should be closely related to anyone else. No first cousins, for example. That’s why an engineered disease somehow killed off so many without a single survivor being related to another. That makes it doubly supernatural.!<
>!God made sure Campion escaped. God made sure Mother Abigail knew what was happening, and what was going to happen. GOD SPOKE DIRECTLY TO THEM THROUGH TOM. Sorry, that was actually a pretty exciting scene for me, and I’m an atheist!!<
>!God collected the good and okay people in Boulder, and sent the slimier to Las Vegas, pretending that was just Flagg. Collected all the baddies in one place. Had them keep Flagg distracted. Flagg’s blind spots were God’s will. Flagg’s power is the power God allowed, and then used to wipe out everyone there. They were at ground zero. Seriously.!<
Hope I did the spoiler-thing right.
Constant readers enjoy his writing, we don’t care how they end, some of us wish they didn’t.
*The Stand*’s climax is often criticised, more especially from readers expecting a slam-bang, drag-down finale. It’s not a true Deus Ex Machina, as many claim (where gods unexpectedly and inexplicably turn up out of the blue to resolve things), as King has clearly set up a world with the Devil’s agent in it, so it would almost be stranger if God didn’t show up, especially as his followers showed faith in Him and made a stand against Evil. That the bomb (which is Flagg’s hubris and aggression turned back on him) is set off by his own magic fireball only completes the narrative themes of the novel—of which the heroes’ act of defiance is the catalyst. God steps in, but not until his followers—whether they truly believe in Him or not—at least make the stand (of the title) for the side of Good.
In doing so, they laugh at Flagg, diminish him in the eyes of his followers, until one of them turns on and questions him. At which point Flagg loses some control, and his temper, and conjures his fireball to eradicate those who defy him. And then Trash turns up, with the weapons of destruction Flagg requires to be successful, and Flagg is hoist by his own petard, as God takes his warlike and aggressive qualities—and yes, hubris—and destroys him with them. The reason the bomb explodes is that it is clearly faulty, leaking radiation—our heroes die also, because this is an Old Testament God, and they are the sacrifice.
These themes are of Good vs Evil, which are seeded throughout the preceding story—how easy it is to succumb to evil, compared to how less easy it can be to devote faith to good—and how simple and ongoing goodness can be attacked by an easy and unthinking or outright malicious act of evil—in a book where the Devil’s representative walks the earth, but can be defeated by simple belief in Good, where making a stand against seemingly unassailable evil is as simple as laughing at it, diminishing it, removing its power, so that the God you may not even really, truly believe in accepts your faith as an Old Testament sacrifice, using Evil’s own hubris and warlike hatred— its own destructive weaponry—against it, turning its own evil magic back on it and smiting that Evil from the land. It seems to me the only logical and realistic climax the book could have.
your question is focusing on the PLOT – and not the THEME. at some point in almost any story worth reading, if the author is going to say something with his work the plot has to become subservient to the theme.
the purpose of the “deus ex machina” (and by extension religion writ large, IMO) is to attempt to solve the intractable problems of humanity through executive action
King pretty explicitly lays out that in this world with much fewer people, the same amount of “power” or “influence” of both good and evil is distributed among the remaining population – making each individuals actions much more meaningful and powerful, and that the real advantage that the good side has over the evil is that the good is collectively motivated and the evil is almost exclusively motivated by a selfish bargain.
this is why the power of self sacrifice looms so large in most religions. AND oddly enough, the real game changer, the tipping point thing that undid Flagg and the las vegas cohort was the third person willing to sacrifice themselves that day – the Trashcan Man. self sacrifice is not the purview of the Flaggs of the world – it will always come down on the other side.
Plot wise sure – it’s a weird moment that feels like it needs explaining, but that i think is why King always seems to excel, instead of being all plot driven or all theme driven, it’s actually both. his stuff always has the feel of a good plot, the desire to know what happens next. but in the end he doesn’t forget to serve his theme and the takeaway is what he wants to say through his writing.
King has stated that he struggles with endings. I suggest Everything’s Eventual, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, or the Green Mile.
That wasn’t even the ending though. There was a whole section of Stu trying to get back to Boulder afterwards.
The Stand is Stephen Kings Lord of the Rings. Much like how Frodo doesn’t deliberately destroy the One Ring, Ralph and Larry do not take down Flagg. The whole point is taking a stand against evil not defeating it. Because given enough time evil will destroy itself. Much like how the One Ring’s power of corruption led to its own destruction Flaggs arrogance led to his.
There’s some good comments here – as far as igniting a nuke, be it a fission or a fusion weapon, it starts with a fission bomb. The bomb is triggered by an electrical pulse that goes to multiple detonators ,to a “ball” of explosives surrounding the core, and releases a burst of neutrons to the weapon’s core at an exactly-timed moment. I imagine all the fail-safes basically keep that electrical impulse from being sent; the bombs likely have an internal battery that provides the detonation power. And the bombs are shielded from electrical interference and so on. So, god or not, it’s mainly getting enough electrical energy to travel down a set of wires and ignite the explosives – I don’t know if the bomb will still go off without the burst of neutrons, or if that’s just to make it more efficient, but that’s likely part of the powering circuit. All the codes and safeguards are to prevent that burst of electricity from happening, one would assume anyway – and at some point you’re hitting classified stuff and just guessing.
Nothing
Nothing at all was wrong with it
I honestly think it is a perfect ending
I remember reading it and getting near the end and thinking how is he going to wrap this mammoth up in the few remaining pages and bam what a wrap up it was
Honestly I hated the ending but the book for me was about connecting with all the characters along the way. King always has had weak endings but the journey is so good. Swan song was great and it had an awesome ending. I still think the stand is a better book.
I’m one of the rare people who absolutely loved the ending of the Stand. This is a story about God and Satan, you can’t really impose logistics on this. Trash Can Man turned out to be a pivotal and unwitting servant of God. Because Flagg treated him so poorly, he was desperate to find something so big and amazing that Flagg would have to recognize his eagerness to contribute to their new society and accept him. If Flagg had treated Trash Can Man better then it would have never happened, he never would have left to go find the nuke and Flagg’s people likely would have prevailed and destroyed the people in Boulder. Yeah it’s cheesy but again, this is a story about God vs. the Devil, it kind of has to be cheesy, and I think King’s ending was the best way to wrap it up, with Flagg being demolished by his own hubris.
This book was an amazing piece of post-apocalyptic world building and survival, and then it was turned into this oddly Rumpelstiltskin metamagic bullshit mumbo jumbo fest by the very end.
It was amazing up until the ending felt super rushed and it was as if King ran out of patience for the story himself and wanted to wrap things up with some hand wavey magic villain nonsense.
I listened to it as evil out of control self-annihilating via hubris.
“I’ve never read any Stephen King before so I decided to give it a go” **reads an over 1000 page tome**
A lot of people miss that it was always God guiding the trash can man. It was always God that he answered to. It was never flagg.
A lot of people also think that Flagg was also part of God’s plan. That everything transpired exactly the way God intended. It’s very ambiguous.
I think people wanted a big epic war for humanity, which admittedly would have been awesome. I didn’t really think the ending we got was awful at all, but I get it.
“Then you have the final scene where Larry and Ralph are ‘offering themselves up’ to Randy Flagg, lambs to the slaughter, the chains and cages subtly representing crucifixion.”
They weren’t offering themselves up, they were making…..a stand, one might say…The Stand.
Nothing. I think it’s a perfect, beautiful deus-ex-machina.
Deus-ex-machina is bad when it’s used to get out of a problem you’ve written yourself into but in the case of The Stand it makes perfect sense given the whole arc of the book.
(As a side note, the Odyssey ends with a less clearly set up Deus ex machina resolution and seems to have survived with a pretty strong reputation….)
Except that’s not the ending, though.
The REAL ending is Tom and Stu’s struggle to make it back to Boulder in one piece.
All the through the book, Trashcan Man states, “my life for you” and we’re lead to believe it’s for the dark man.
God, in SK books is cruel & uses people.
Stu & his lot were to lead people to promised land.
But then decide they need to politic.
They end up being a diversion so Trashcan Man can do what he was always destined to do – a reverse Judas.
(But also because evil is short lived can only destroy and often finds its own ending that destruction.
Stu & his lot then become Moses down from the mountain to let the people know what God says.
But yes, his endings are weak.
However, in the edition I read when I was 13, the book finishes and RF appears on an island in front of primitive people who then worship him as a God which gave me nightmares
I feel like the ending made sense in The Stand’s world and related to the book’s theme. Outside of that, the ending was pretty meh imo. Still love the book though.
King has said that The Stand is his attempt at an American Lord of the Rings, and Tolkien has said that divine intervention (of a sort) was involved with Gollum’s fate on Mount Doom. I think both endings work within their respective worlds.
I think it’s one of King’s better endings. Pretty much all of his drug fueled 80s stuff has wild, outrageous endings.
I haven’t done any reading of interpretations of *The Stand*, so forgive me if this kind of thing has been said before, but *The Stand* seems like it was based on a common apocalyptic scenario fantasized about by certain believers in dispensational premillennialism Christianity, the kind who, in later decades, read the *Left Behind* books as prediction of the End Times that they literally believe will be happening soon. The cast of characters in *The Stand* and what they did closely aligned with what this community valorizes. Like as if King went to a church service led by these guys and that was the catalyst for him thinking of this story.
The common, decent “country don’t mean dumb” Stu Redman who could never get ahead because he was helping other people who went on to bigger and better things, forgetting about him; the educated, wealthy and successful survivors preferentially going to Vegas, the most sinful city on earth, which was explicitly stated by Glen so not even my interpretation; the fetus destined for abortion who ended up being a miracle baby, the first child born in a new world; the communistic yet selfish ways in Vegas; the redeemed prostitute; the simple, poor, uneducated Mother Abigail as prophetess; the saintly, undervalued Nick Andros; the sinful, terrifying Manhattan; the good offering themselves up to their own doom like Jesus, as you mentioned; Harold as Judas; crucifixion imagery; and on and on.
So in this scheme, it was foreordained that there would be the hand of god intervening to kill the sinful and save the good. For your specific questions:
1. Yes, it was important that the seeds of the destruction of Satan lay in what Sata himself did. The lord was working through Satan to save his faithful and destroy the wicked all alongl
2. I think you’re right, god was guiding Trashcan Man. The whole time Flagg thought he was working for Flagg (“My life for you!”) but he was really working for god.
3. as said above, it was a deliberate deus ex machina–it had to be, given all the religious symbolism and religious foundation for the plot.
Also, dunno your age, but keep in mind that during the cold war, nuclear war was pretty prominent in people’s minds, so having the whole thing end in a nuclear conflagration was totally on-point and emotionally resonant for a Cold War audience. But in the present day, with nuclear war being less top-of-mind, it’s a bit more out-of-left-field.
Quite a few great questions here, but I think the most important question is:
Baby can you dig your man?
Even the devil gets hix power from God, and even the devil can’t control his own power, as he has the seeds of his own destruction in him.
But, it’s the biblical purifying of the world through fire. Noah’s Ark was through water.