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3 Literary Naturalism in King's Works In his fiction King reverts again and again to the duality between good and evil and the fact that human beings personify both. The very exercise of free will poses the major problems for the protagonists in most of his stories, and therefore it is the basis of my analysis of naturalistic traits in his fiction. The discussion of King's various types of determinism takes the individual character as the starting point and proceeds through genetic determinism and sociological determinism to cosmological determinism and, finally, to metafictional determinism, the means by which the author controls the forces controlling his fictional multiverse. In brief, the main issues analyzed in some detail are the question of whether human will is free or constrained (the section "Free Will and Responsibility") and the four types of determinism in King, including fate with its various synonyms ("Genetic and Sociological Determinism," "Cosmological Determinism and Fate," and "Metafictional Determinism"). Martin Gray defines naturalism as "[a] more particularised branch of realism" (135). Therefore, before I discuss the naturalistic traits in King, it is worthwhile to consider whether he can also be regarded as a realist. Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen in Truth, Fiction, and Literature view realism as having three prominent features: "a certain kind of aim, namely, truth-telling or 'faithfulness' to the facts; a certain kind of content, the representation of social reality in particulars; and a certain kind of form, involving simplicity rather than ornateness, mirroring that 179 Copyrighted Material 180 Literary Naturalism in King's Works " of documentary history" (311-12, italics in original). While Lamarque and Olsen define the aim of realism as a documentation of real facts, King deals with real-life fears through allegory. He argues that "the horror genre has been able to find national phobic pressure points, and those books and films which have been the most successful almost always seem to play upon and express fears which exist across a wide spectrum of people" (OM, 5). Allegory is needed, because "if the shit starts getting too thick, [authors and filmmakers] can always bring the monster shambling out of the darkness again" (5). Although he explores the difficult questions of real life and, in a sense, documents American life, King takes liberties to advance his ideas. On a number of occasions , he has also expressed the paradox implicit in the horror genre: "Reality is an unnatural order" (Winter, Art, 114, italics in original) and "Fiction is the truth inside the lie" (OM, 403). During his search for moral truth, King frequently surpasses the boundaries of realism and cannot thus be regarded as a realist in the strict sense of the term. In other words, only a few of his stories could actually take place in real life, and even the vast majority of these stories are borderline cases. Of all his writing, "The Body," a thinly veiled autobiographical, coming-of-age story, presents King at his most realistic. It relates the story of four friends who undertake a rite of passage to find the corpse of a boy who has disappeared, but who, in fact, has been hit by a train. When dealing with issues of mortality, King discusses them in terms of fate. As Leonard G. Heldreth notes, even the surname of the protagonist and King's alter ego, Gordon Lachance, can be regarded as a pun on both King's unexpected success as a writer and the twists of fate in general ("Viewing 'The Body,"' 73). Also, anyone of the novella's boys could have been hit by the train in place of Ray Browner. Similarly, it is a mere twist of fate that Lachance was the only one to survive into manhood. Although "The Body," like a number of other King stories, lacks the supernatural element, King admits that "[e]lements of horror can be found in all of the tales ...-that business with the slugs in The Body is pretty gruesome" (05,502, italics in original). In other words, King labels his most realistic story horror. From documented shooting incidents at schools, we know that-unlike in Rage-pupils do not stay in classrooms to discuss Copyrighted Material Literary Naturalism in King's Works their personal problems with a killer when their school is surrounded by the police and their mathematics teacher lies dead on the floor. The collection Night Shift includes merely two stories that can in any way be regarded as documents of real...

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