SOURCE: "A Clockwork Evil: Guilt and Coincidence in 'The Monkey,' " in The Dark Descent: Essays Defining Stephen King's Horrorscope, edited by Tony Magistrale, Greenwood Press, 1992, pp. 129-36.

[Doty is an American educator and critic. In the following essay, he explores themes and narrative technique in "The Monkey. " ]

In "The Monkey," Stephen King has used an extremely unlikely object to arouse terror in his readers, a toy that is "nothing but cogs and clockwork" [Skeleton Crew]. This [essay] will explore the means by which King makes the monkey's association with the deaths in the story convincing and answer William F. Nolan's charge that, while powerfully written, "The Monkey" "lacks interior logic" [Kingdom of Fear; The World of Stephen King, 1987].

Douglas Winter, who calls "The Monkey" "one of King's best short stories," sees the monkey as representing a random, or fated, evil, "without apparent logic or motivation." Tony Magistrale takes an opposite view when he says that the monkey represents Hal's "dark recollections" of "childhood . . . guilt and anxiety." The tension between these two possible understandings of the monkey creates much of the effect of the story.

The question of the story's "interior logic" centers on the relationship between Hal and the monkey. There is an alternative to Winter's view that the monkey is an external, irrational evil, and Magistrale's view that the monkey is an objective correlative for Hal's guilt. In explaining this third possibility, I will also show the interior logic, which Nolan says the story lacks.

In the story, Hal Shelburn returns to his boyhood home after his aunt's death, bringing with him his sons, Dennis (aged 12) and Petey (aged 10), and his wife, Terry. His sons discover the monkey in the attic, and its discovery brings back the fear and guilt that Hal felt after discovering the monkey as a young child. After perceiving its association with several deaths, including his mother's, Hal attempts to destroy it by throwing it down a dry well. The story narrates the "present" when Hal as an adult has to deal with the monkey again, but the narration is interwoven with extensive flashbacks to Hal's childhood experiences with the monkey.

Hal first finds the monkey in his mother's attic when he is four years old. The monkey holds two cymbals, which it is supposed to clash together when wound up. Hal quickly discovers, to his disappointment, that the monkey does not work when he winds it up, but it does sometimes spontaneously clash its cymbals together. The horrible thing is that when it does so, someone dies. Its first victim is a child who falls from a tree. Other victims include Hal's and his brother's babysitter, a dog, yet another child, and the boy's mother.

The deaths associated with the monkey are not narrated in chronological order, but in an order of increasing emotional intensity. The effect of the interweaving of Hal's childhood and adult experiences is to identify Hal the adult with Hal the child, and also to create a strong link between Hal and Petey, his younger son. The interweaving also establishes a strong but ambiguous link between Hal and the monkey.

King describes the monkey both as a mindless mechanism and as taking malicious pleasure in the deaths it causes. Being a mere mechanism, it lacks conscious purpose; nor does it act directly to cause the deaths with which it is associated. Hal, as the viewpoint character, connects the monkey with the deaths. No one but Hal, and at the end Petey, perceives the connection between the monkey and the deaths. Through Hal, the reader is convinced of the connection between the monkey's cymbals and the deaths.

On one level the monkey embodies our dread of the accident that can befall any of us at any time. As much as we would like to pretend otherwise, none of our lives are secure. Heart embolisms, enraged lovers, drunken drivers, bizarre accidents: all of these and more are possible every moment of our lives, and all of them bring death in "The Monkey." Hal's life seems to have a large share of such dreadful accidents, beginning with the disappearance of his father, who may have been a victim of the monkey also, although neither Hal nor the reader is ever sure of this.

In connecting the monkey with the deaths, Hal has found a cause for these irrational accidents. Tragically, the monkey is beyond Hal's control and understanding. William F. Nolan asks the obvious question; why doesn't Hal "simply destroy the monkey?" Part of the answer is that the monkey exerts a will of its own, returning from the junk dealer whose truck Hal has thrown it on, reappearing in the same carton he originally found it in, and even appearing again twenty years after Hal had thrown it into a dry well. Terrified of the monkey, the child Hal is powerless to destroy it, disable it, or throw it away. Hal's inability to rid himself of the monkey suggests that the connection between them is complex.

When Hal takes the monkey to the well to dispose of it, he almost falls through the rotten boards covering the well, and becomes badly scratched by the thorns growing around it. This scene clearly suggests that the monkey has the power to destroy Hal, that Hal endangers himself when he threatens the monkey. In an earlier incident, when he is seven, after kicking the monkey violently, Hal "hears" the monkey telling him that Hal can kick as much as he wants, the monkey is "not real, just a funny clock-work monkey," implying that Hal really cannot injure or deter it; the monkey is both intimately linked to Hal and independent of his conscious control.

On this occasion, which results in the death of another child, Hal attacks the monkey, determined "to stomp it, smash it, jump on it"; but as Hal rushes the monkey, it sounds its cymbals again, quietly, "and a sliver of ice seem[s] to whisper its way through the walls of [Hal's] heart, impaling it, stilling his fury and leaving him sick with terror again." The monkey has the power to act on its own, even though it is "merely" a toy. Furthermore, the terror that the monkey instills in Hal keeps him from being able to destroy it.

On the day his mother dies, Hal comes home from school to find the monkey on a shelf in his room, after he thought he had hidden it in the attic where he originally found it. So far in the story, Hal's father has disappeared, Beulah the babysitter has been shot, and Bill's friend, Charlie Silverman, has been run over by a drunk. Hal connects the monkey's sounding its cymbals to the deaths and suspects that the monkey is connected to his father's disappearance. Now, home from school, Hal approaches the monkey "as if from outside himself—as if his own body had been turned into a windup toy at the sight of the monkey." Hal watches himself take down the monkey and turn the key, and he hears its mechanism begin to work. The nightmarish quality of this experience is due to Hal's awareness of the significance of what he is doing, and his inability to stop himself from winding up the monkey.

When his mother dies (of a brain embolism—there is always a natural cause for deaths associated with the monkey), Hal and the monkey exchange conditions. Hal becomes an automaton, doing the monkey's will, and the monkey becomes alive: "it was alive. . . and the vibration he felt through its balding brown fur was not that of turning cogs but the beating of its heart." In addition to the loss of his mother, Hal feels "guilt: the certain deadly knowledge that he had killed his mother by winding up the monkey on that sunny after-school afternoon." Neither Hal nor the monkey is the physical cause of his mother's death, but Hal feels guilty because he associates the monkey's action with her death—and he wound up the monkey.

Hal's relationship to the monkey is complex. When Hal first finds the monkey, it startles him because he thinks it is alive. Then, realizing it is a toy, he is delighted: "Its funny grin pleased him." Remembering the incident as an adult, Hal wonders if there was not another element in his initial response to the monkey: "Hadn't there been something else? An almost instinctive feeling of disgust?" As this passage shows, when Hal remembers his initial, childhood response to the monkey, he is unsure of exactly what that response was. But what King records in the narrative of Hal's discovery is delight. This delight expresses an immediate bond between Hal and the monkey, a bond that leads to his obsession with it. Because of this bond, Hal believes that the monkey has somehow caused the deaths of several people, a dog, and even a fly.

Hal is not simply the witness and indirect victim of the monkey's malevolence. Instead, several details indicate a close relationship between Hal and the monkey. When Hal returns to his childhood home at the beginning of the story, he looks into the well where he had thrown the monkey twenty years before. At the bottom of the well, Hal sees a reflected face, which he at first thinks is the monkey's. However, as Hal quickly realize, the reflected face is his own. Throughout the story, Hal "hears" the monkey's voice speaking to him personally and directly. The monkey also influences Hal's consciousness and his actions; for instance, the monkey tries to get Hal to wind it up. After Hal has tried to get rid of the monkey by putting it on a rag-man's truck, it returns, and "speaks" to him: "Thought you got rid of me, didn't you? But I'm not that easy to get rid of, Hal. I like you. We were made for each other, just a boy and his pet monkey, a couple of good old buddies."

The story is not really about a spooky toy monkey; it is about Hal, his fears and shames, and his desperate efforts to deal with them. Hal, like any normal child, must experience resentments toward the other people in his life, and, consequently, must also fantasize about their deaths. Abandoned by his father, orphaned by his mother's death, Hal has more than the usual reasons for resentment and fantasies of what his life might have been. Such resentments and fantasies create guilt in the normal person, and in Hal's case, they bind him to the deadly monkey. This guilt, violence, and anxiety link Hal and the monkey at a deep level but also make them antagonists. Hal struggles with the monkey, seeking to resist the attraction it exerts on him, and to cleanse himself of the negative qualities it expresses.

Hal's childhood guilt and rage have carried over into his adulthood. The monkey expresses a destructive urge in Hal as a father and husband. Hal feels an "uncontrollable hostility toward Dennis [his older son] more and more often." In this scene, Hal slams Dennis against the door several times; the monkey grins,"as if approbation." The monkey's malevolent grin expresses a facet of Hal himself. As a man and a father, Hal is unpredictable and violent. He fears the growing disaffection of his older son, Dennis, and is inwardly terrified that something awful will happen to his younger son, Petey. He feels alienated from his wife, who is taking "a lot of Valium." These anxieties and frustrations lead Hal to unintended violence against his son. They also repeat the fears of his childhood, providing the emotional context for the monkey's return; Hal is bonded to the monkey by his fear and guilt.

Petey, the favored son, shares Hal's sensitivity to the monkey. Having touched the monkey, he tells Hal that he both hates and likes the way the monkey feels. Then he informs Hal, "Daddy, I don't like that monkey" and also recognizes that the monkey is "bad." Like Hal, Petey has heard the monkey's voice, urging him to wind it up: "Wind me up, Petey, we'll play, your father isn't going to wake up, he's never going to wake up at all." The monkey has displaced Hal's father, and now seeks to displace Hal as Petey's father. The monkey's power of initiative and malevolent will are shown clearly as it seeks Hal's death.

When Hal rows out on the lake to sink the monkey, it appears to him that Petey regresses from nine years old to four. Significantly, Hal was four when he first found the monkey. Even though Petey does not go out in the boat with Hal, he definitely plays a part in sending the monkey to the bottom of the lake. From his position on the shore, Petey encourages and exhorts Hal, and warns him of the cloud that blows up with the storm. The love between father and son makes it possible for Petey to help Hal reexperience his original contact with the monkey, and rid his life of its maliciousness by banishing the fear and guilt rooted in his own childhood.

Even though it appears to be an ordinary toy, there are several indications that the monkey is unnatural. These include the monkey's apparent delight in the deaths it causes, as well as the anxieties it produces in Hal. King's repeated descriptions of the monkey's teeth and grin imply that the monkey consciously relishes its role in bringing death and suffering to human beings. In these descriptions, King clearly suggests that the monkey is more than a toy, but the descriptions do not in themselves suffice to make the monkey an objective agent of evil.

The reader is partly convinced of the monkey's malice by the credibility of Hal's experience. Hal is believable largely because, like many of Kings's characters, he is one of us. One might see him in line at Radio Shack or at a PTA meeting. He experiences the same family difficulties that many middle-class fathers face. The reader can easily recognize and identify with these experiences and emotions.

Thus, the reader is prepared to accept Hal's memories of his childhood, as well as the new terrors he experiences after returning to his childhood home and rediscovering the instrument of his earlier terrors. Many readers will find their own childhood fears and anxieties intensified in the unusual ones that Hal experiences.

The story has a subtler dimension that gives the monkey its air of dread: even though nothing shows it directly causing the deaths, it is clearly connected with them. In fact, all of the deaths are "accidental," with natural causes to explain them. The closest thing to an act directly caused by the monkey is the death of the fly toward the end of the story. Petey drops the bag with the monkey in it; the monkey's cymbal strikes a rock and clangs. At that moment, a fly drops dead. But the only connection between the sounding of the cymbal and the death of the fly is that they happen in immediate succession. No direct causal link between the two is apparent.

There is a suggestion in the story that the monkey is more than a clockwork toy. When Hal rows out onto the lake to sink the monkey into the deepest part, a monkeyshaped cloud appears in the sky, associated with a storm that arises suddenly: "The sun was behind the cloud, turning it into a hunched, working shape with two gold-edged crescents held apart." King makes the nature of the monkey more complex by giving the earthly monkey a "celestial" counterpart, a cloud-spirit that manifests when the monkey is in great danger, almost bringing about Hal's death through the storm.

Just before Hal drops the monkey in the lake at the end of the story, he talks to Petey about its origins. Hal recognizes that while the monkey must have originally been one of many identical toys, subsequently "something bad" had happened to it. Hal then speculates that perhaps "most bad things" are not conscious of their badness, "that most evil might be very much like a monkey full of clockwork." The monkey combines the horror of a mindless evil with that of a deliberately malicious evil, as it seems both a (broken) mechanical toy and a living force that Hal cannot throw away or destroy. And, as stated before, the only connection between the monkey and the deaths is Hal's consciousness of the coincidence of its clanging its cymbals as each death occurs.

Throughout the story, the pattern of simple coincidence is the same: the monkey sounds its cymbals, and then someone dies. The question remains, What is the link between the cymbals and the deaths? Or, in William F. Nolan's phrase, What is the "interior logic" of the story? The monkey's role in the deaths is established through Hal's interpretation of events. Just because one event precedes or accompanies another does not mean it causes the other event. However, from an emotional and symbolic perspective, Hal's connecting the cymbals with the deaths is quite convincing.

The sound of the cymbals often initiates Hal's hearing the monkey's voice. In terms of sound-associations and resonances, when Hal (at seven years old) throws the monkey down the well, he hears the cymbals' jang-jang after it has hit the bottom, and flees, "his ears still jangling" (my emphasis). In several sentences that climax this section, King uses notable alliteration, establishing a cluster of sounds associated with the monkey's deadly action:

If the monkey wanted to clap its hellish cymbals now, let it. It could clap and crash them for the crawling bugs and beetles, the dark things that made their home in the well's stone gullet. It would rot down there. Its loathsome cogs and wheels and springs would rust down there. It would die down there. In the mud and darkness. Spiders would spin it a shroud. (emphases mine)

The sounds in these sentences are woven together so closely and subtly that there are more repetitions and partial alliterations than I have emphasized. The syntactical repetitions also contribute to the effect of this passage, which is an emotional and imagistic climax, effectively expressing the dreadfulness of the monkey.

Closely associated with the sound of the cymbals is the clicking sound the key makes when it is turned. In the scene narrating Hal's original discovery of the monkey (at age four), King describes the sleet "ticking" off the windows "sporadically," and off the roof "hypnotically." Both adverbs are significant: the monkey only works "sporadically," and it affects Hal "hypnotically." Further, the resemblance between the "ticking" of the sleet and the various "clicks" that the monkey's key makes is an example of the way sounds cluster around meaning, and, in the process, become expressive of the irrational qualities of experience. And, of course, the wintry chill of the sleet is congruent with the tone of the whole story.

The coincidence between the monkey and the deaths has an overwhelming and dreadful meaning for Hal because of his guilt over his part in its action, his fear of the monkey's apparent independence, and the emotional impact of the deaths themselves. The reader, in so far as he or she identifies with Hal's experiences, shares in the uncanny dread aroused by the monkey's association with the deaths and the apparent impossibility of getting rid of it.

"The Monkey" presents a world in which evil constantly threatens human beings, who do not even have the comfort of being afflicted by a personal evil, which they might at least be able to understand. The clockwork monkey's maliciousness embodies the accidental, irrational evil and suffering that constantly threaten all of us. In a world in which parents are absent (Hal's father), violent (Hal himself ), or drugged (Hal's wife), the child must survive by his own resources. The return of the monkey puts Hal back in a child's state of terror and powerlessness. Paradoxically, by returning to a child-like state, Hal is able to relive his link with the monkey, and to untie the bonds of guilt and fear that connect him to it. His love for Petey gives him additional access to the innocence and directness of childhood. Through their shared love and courage, Hal and Petey are able to defeat the evil represented by the monkey, an evil that lies both outside them and inside them. Working together, Hal and Petey integrate the child and the adult.

Douglas Winter and Tony Magistrale posit two opposite interpretations of Hal's relationship to the monkey, Winter suggesting that the monkey is an objective evil, external to Hal, and Magistrale suggesting that it is a subjective evil, expressive only of Hal's personal fears and guilts. I have shown that the monkey's relationship to Hal is both objective and subjective—that the monkey is an evil beyond Hal's understanding and control, while at the same time, it is an evil intimate to Hal, a vehicle of his fears and guilts. One could say that the monkey embodies a more universal Evil, while Hal simply embodies a more personal evil.

The open-ended conclusion of "The Monkey" shows the subtle relationship between Hal and the evil toy. After Hal has sunk the monkey in the lake, he imagines a boy, fishing with his father, hooking the stuffed animal and reeling it in, "weeds draggling from its cymbals, grinning its terrible, welcoming grin." Then the story ends with a newspaper column describing "hundreds of dead fish" found in the lake. King suggests that, while Hal may finally have rid his life of the monkey, it is not finished and is biding its time.