The Long Walk by: Stephen King as Richard Bachman

 

When I read Rage I came away with the idea that Stephen King didn’t actually have much to say about the teenage experience, violence, or the reasons mass shootings happen.  The Long Walk is perhaps the complete opposite of that.  Like Rage, it was written when King was young, apparently while he was a freshman in college and is the first novel he actually completed (I guess Rage was one of the first he started writing).  You can tell it is an earlier work, not because it lacks substance, but because the clear eye of the anger from King is the United States government and its actions in the Vietnam War towards specifically the American public.  It was published in 1979, four years after the end of the Vietnam War, but King was writing the novel first in the mid-1960s.  The Vietnam War was just under a decade from ending and the opinion of the American public towards the war was beginning to shift in America because it was after the escalation of American troops but the campus protest movement wouldn’t peak until 1970.  He was writing as a young man, righteously angry at what is dominating politics in an America in the grips of conservatism.  It’s almost fitting to be published just one year before Ronald Reagan would be elected president and further push the country to the right, though it does mean The Long Walk is a novel that feels retrospective.

 

It's certainly a novel that leaves the reader quite raw.  It chronicles the deaths of 99 young men on the annual long walk, a state sponsored competition where boys must walk at four miles per hour along a path for the chance of a wish and untold wishes.  Going below that speed for 30 seconds leads to a warning, three warnings and the walker is shot dead.  The premise is clearly a metaphor for the draft, so much is built on the “honor” of the draft into the United States Army.  It is something to be dodged, something essentially unavoidable (there is a recounting of one boy signing up for the walk on a whim because the recruiters were there and it was something to do).  King is excellent on the stark horror of a child being gunned down by the United States military.  This is something repeated throughout the book, other deaths coming in other horrific ways as the walk goes on, each deviation being arguable a bigger point against the war and the United States government.  There are attempted uprising, suicide, and a boy who just sits down to die against the system.

 

The Long Walk, however, doesn’t change the system.  The novel ends with an ending that isn’t so much literal.  Sure, this instance of the walk is over, but King is intent on neglecting catharsis, the protagonist Ray Garraty just keeps walking towards a figure in the distance: “And when the hand touched his shoulder again, he somehow found the strength to run” (King, 322).  That is the line with which King closes the novel, Garraty doesn’t get his wish, he doesn’t get to see any justice done towards the system.  The Major, the representation of the state personified and the man responsible for disappearing Garraty’s father, is not a villain defeated by our heroes.  He is the monolith of a state that is still in power, a state that by the end of The Long Walk has killed 99 boys after putting them through their own version of hell, brought out their insecurities and lives (some of the walkers are awful people in it for the cruelty, others are implied to be gay and living in the closet in a state where they must deny themselves).  That’s why it’s such a strong read.  It’s a far louder scream of rage with that rage directed.  Sure it does not ever come to a conclusion as to what might beat the system, the ending is broken pessimism.  It is also clearly written by a college student at the beginning of his career, some of the walkers are reduced to shallow traits despite King clearly playing with the humanity of each of the 100, and it’s also clear that King is not someone who has walked at four miles per hour, that is more of a jog.  8/10.

 

King, Stephen.  “The Long Walk.” The Bachman Books.  New American Library, 1985, pp. 133-322.