Misery

The chapter opens with a scene from Misery’s Return, in which Ian and Geoffrey watch bees flying into an African clearing. The text breaks off suddenly. In the present moment, Paul shakes the typewriter until the letter “t” falls out. He considers demanding that Annie buy him a new typewriter. But—with one less foot and now missing a thumb as well—Paul knows he is no longer brave enough to even ask. It is the first day of summer. He returns to work. In the book, Geoffrey stops Ian from trying to save Misery, who is bound naked in the clearing, covered in deadly bees. Hezekiah, their African companion, assures them that as long as the drums sound, the bees will sleep.

Again, the story halts midsentence as Paul stops writing. The typewriter has thrown the most common letter in the English language: “e.” Annie is outside on her riding lawnmower. He knows he will have to write the novel longhand from now on. He is unwilling to ask Annie for a new machine because she has become too weird. Paul flashes back to her cutting his foot off with the axe, wishing his imagination was less vivid. He considers that being a writer inherently involves remembering “the story of every scar.” Unable to write anymore, he decides to mentally revisit that story again, in the hopes that it will stop haunting him.

After Annie hobbled Paul, his pain went away for a while. His mind urges him through the memories of that time, insisting there is a theme: misery. The word has come to refer both to his long and pointless suffering, and the character and plot that saved him. He has been acting as Scheherazade—telling a story to survive—not only to Annie, but to himself. Paul knows he almost died when Annie hobbled him, but he believes he didn’t die because of the insurmountable urge to know how Misery’s story played out. As ridiculous a story as it is, Paul’s vision of the novel’s climax—with the droning bees and Misery’s empty handcuffs on the eucalyptus tree—kept him tethered to life.

Annie did not let Paul go back to work immediately, after all the hard work she did to keep him alive. She went back to filling in the ns in his manuscript, perhaps as a kind of atonement. But soon, what Paul calls “the gotta” had set in: both Paul and Annie “gotta” know what happens next in the story. Paul compares his writerly ability to elicit this response in a reader to something shameful, an impulsive addiction. As his own Scheherazade, Paul imagines the impulse to write as masturbatory: he satisfies his own need to know how the story turns out. Gradually, he writes for longer stretches despite the pain in his stump. Annie reads his pages each night, because she too has caught “the gotta.”

Paul recalls the events that led Annie to cut off his thumb. Some days before, Annie brought him a sundae and asked him to tell her the rest of the novel. Paul is not surprised she cannot wait, but he refused to tell her. He no longer fears death, but he does not want to feel pain again. Angry, Annie threatened to force Paul to tell her what happens. He compared her to a child calling her mother mean, as she once described him. Paul ended up reprimanding Annie for wanting “to cut open the golden goose.” Seeming chastened, she apologized. They went back to their routine for a while. Now, Paul realizes this argument was the cause of the “thumbectomy.”

 A few days later, Paul complained to Annie that the typewriter’s thunks were irritating him, and she cut off his thumb. Now, he realizes she was actually enraged that Paul had denied her request and she had to accept it. Paul reflects on the powerful influence art has on people, evoking real feelings of grief and outrage over the fates of fictional characters. He himself has lost sleep over characters who died gruesome deaths, and he vomited after finishing Lord of the Flies at age 12. He even knew a woman—Mrs. Roman D. (“Virginia”) Sandpiper, who turned a room in her house into “Misery’s Parlor.” Paul calls this kind of literary obsession “the Scheherazade complex.”

Paul falls asleep and remembers the actual removal of his thumb. After Paul complained about the typewriter, Annie brought an electric knife into his room. She threatened to slit Paul’s throat if he fought, then severed his thumb, all while insisting she loved him. At this point, Paul’s mind tries to wake him, not wanting to remember what happened next. Later that day, Annie brought Paul a birthday cake with candles and his severed thumb stuck in the frosting. If he promised to be good, he would not have to eat any of the “special candle.” Paul’s memory devolves into hysteria, and he wakes up holding back a scream. Through the window, he sees a police car in the driveway.