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Last night, I read pages 904-950 of Stephen King’s The Stand: The Complete and Uncut Edition. I have two items:
1. After Harold and Nadine blew up the site of the Free Zone committee and left, a meeting of the larger Free Zone was held. Stu was chairing the meeting, and he was trying to persuade the people there that, were Harold and Nadine to return, they would be tried according to the rule of law, not the rule of the mob. After all, the Free Zone is the good side, he points out, and thus it should deal with things in a more civilized manner than Randall Flagg does. (Randall Flagg simply crucifies people if they get out of line.)
The reason that this passage stood out to me was that the Free Zone had the good people, and yet even the good people could do bad things. Earlier in the book, that was why Stu was appointed a marshall: because, without the rule of law, people were getting out of hand. There were accidents and drunken disorderly conduct, which did not flow from evil, but there was also the woman who cheated on her husband, who then got jealous and sought to kill his rival.
At the same time, on Randall Flagg’s side, which is evil, there are people who do good things. Trashcan Man, who was never accepted throughout his entire life (except by his mother), finally finds acceptance in the midst of Randall Flagg’s community. (But a lot of that is mercenary, for, as Lloyd notes, Trashcan Man always brings back a supply of weapons that he has found.)
So what sets apart a good person from an evil person, if both do good and bad things? I suppose that one difference between the Free Zone and Randall Flagg’s side is that the former is constructive, whereas the latter is destructive, in that it wants to destroy the Free Zone. Good is conducive to construction; whereas evil may have to do constructive things to survive, however, evil contains the seeds of its own downfall because of its destructive nature.
I think that this is Stephen King’s point. I believe, though, that Flagg tries to contain the destruction by running so tight of a ship. But how easy is that, when he has attracted to his side the people who have destructive tendencies?
2. Mother Abagail is on her deathbed, and she sends Glen, Stu, Larry, and Ralph on a mission: to go West and to stand against Randall Flagg (and yet she realizes that one of those four will fall on the way). Mother Abagail believes that people were drawn to Boulder, not to form committees or to re-organize society, but rather to destroy Flagg. On first sight, this does not make much sense to me. I mean, shouldn’t reorganizing society be more important than taking out Flagg? Taking out Flagg is a means to the end of protecting a society that is trying to reorganize itself, for Flagg’s desire is to decimate the Free Zone. But perhaps people were drawn to Boulder for the specific reason of destroying Flagg, for they did not have to come together to Boulder to reorganize society: different pockets of people could have re-started society in a variety of cities throughout America. But they would have still been vulnerable to Flagg, who would have sought to spread his reign of evil and terror throughout America. So standing against Flagg is important.
There was a lot about theodicy in what I read last night. Fran does not want Stu to go on Mother Abagail’s mission, for Stu may die, and Fran calls God a “Killer God”, blaming him for the plague. But there is an attempt among the people there to trust that God is good. After all, would God bring all those good people to Boulder if his sole design was to screw them over? Moreover, God through Mother Abagail heals Fran of the whiplash she got from the explosion, as a sign of God’s goodness. At the same time, there is uncertainty about what God will do: perhaps God wants to use Flagg to purify people’s character, and so Flagg could prevail, at least temporarily. But I do not think that Mother Abagail’s faith is ultimately pessimistic, for, if her God does allow suffering for a good end, that must mean that God’s design is good—-that the end of the story will be good.
