63 pages • 2 hours read

11.22.63

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2011

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Themes

The Dangers of Time Travel

Time travel is a common sci-fi theme that touches on ideas that have never been fully explored or explained in real time. No one really knows what would happen if a person were to go back in time and change a major event in history, but King uses the plot of this novel to play with that concept, adding an element of historical fiction to the tale. One of King’s characters suggests that the death of President Kennedy in 1963 was directly related to race riots, assassinations, and war that followed in the years after his death. He wonders if those things would change if President Kennedy’s life were spared on that fateful afternoon in Dallas. This is a question many others have also wondered along with questions, such as whether President Kennedy’s assassin was a lone gunman. Given the opportunity to go back and find out, Jake jumps at the chance.

Time travel, on the surface, offers an opportunity to change things for the better. Jake goes to the past to change President Kennedy’s fate because he fully believes it is the right thing to do. This is the same reason he changes Harry Dunning’s past. Jake believes that stopping Frank Dunning from killing the majority of his family will give Harry a better life. However, he never stops to analyze the outcome of his actions. Harry lived; however, after Jake’s first effort to save Harry, he goes to Vietnam as a young man and dies. The second time Jake saves the Dunning family, Harry is paralyzed while fighting in Vietnam. While Harry gets married and appears to have a good life after his experiences in Vietnam, it is still unclear what Jake really saved Harry from. Violence still touches his life in both incarnations. Harry never really has an ideal life. He seems to have a happier childhood because his mother and siblings survived, but it may have been overshadowed after the first episode by Tugga’s death and after the second by the murder of his father. Jake never bothered to ask Harry if a different childhood was something he wanted, and he never wonders if Harry is content in his life in any of the incarnations he lives. This bears the question of whether or not Jake’s actions really benefitted Harry, or if it simply made Jake feel better about the life Harry lived. The same can be applied to Jake’s mission to save President Kennedy. He never stops to wonder if what he is doing will create a happy world. He makes assumptions that come back to haunt him when he finally learns the truth about time travel from the new Yellow Card Man.

Jake learns in the end that each time a person travels in time, new strings are created. Reality can only handle so many strings. When Jake stops the assassination of President Kennedy, his existence in the past for five years, interacting with an entire community of people, and this huge change in history cause so many new strings that it threatens reality. Jake attempted to save the world but led it to destruction. He learns his lesson but at the cost of losing the woman he loves not once, but twice. He loses Sadie when she is killed by Lee Harvey’s bullet, and he loses her again when he realizes he cannot go back and find her a second time.

Harmonies

Jake experiences what he refers to as “harmonies” multiple times as he travels through time. Harmonies, according to him, are moments when the past and the present sync up. For example, Jake experiences an early harmony when he meets Beverly Marsh and Richie Tozier. The two kids are practicing the lindy to the song “In the Mood” when he comes upon them. This is a dance Jake is familiar with because he and his wife Christy were participants in ballroom dancing competitions and danced this very dance.

Jake continues to notice more harmonies the longer he is in the past. He takes multiple taxi rides, and the driver is often listening to the same radio station and smoking the same cigarettes as the previous driver. He meets Chaz Frati in Derry and then Frank Frati in Dallas. He saves a woman named Doris Dunning from her murderous husband and then saves his girlfriend, Sadie Doris Dunhill, from her crazed husband. There are many harmonies that Jake learns to recognize as he spends time in the past; some prove to be harmful, and some are helpful. One helpful harmony is the Ford Sunliner. Jake bought a Ford Sunliner he loved and kept a spare key in the glovebox. Sometime later, his Ford Sunliner has to be replaced. However, on 11/22/63 when Jake is trying to get to the Texas School Book Depository, he sees a Ford Sunliner on the street. He breaks in and finds a spare key in the glovebox.

Jake wonders about these harmonies often, but he never comes up with a satisfactory explanation for them until he meets the second Yellow Card Man. This man, Zack, explains to him that each time someone goes through the rabbit-hole, or time portal, they change things. Even though time appears to be reset with the next visit through the rabbit-hole, a residue remains from the previous visits. This is the source of the harmonies. This also explains why the first Yellow Card Man called Jake JIMLA. The Yellow Card Man saw a time string in which Jake was at a Jodie football game and he heard the chant of JIMLA. He associated this with Jake, but his struggle to understand the multiple strings of time drove him insane and he couldn’t express to Jake the danger he was posing to the fabric of reality with his multiple visits into the past.

Time’s Resistance to Change

When Al introduces Jake to the rabbit-hole, he shares his dream of stopping the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Al believes that stopping this assassination will prevent many dark moments in history that followed, including race riots, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, and the escalation of troops in Vietnam. It occurs to Al that there might be repercussions to changing history, so he decides to run a test. It is during this test that Al discovers time is resistant to change. He calls the past “obdurate.”

The first time Al attempts to change the past, he runs into multiple problems including two flat tires and a felled tree across the road. He succeeds in stopping the shooting that placed Carolyn Poulin in a wheelchair. However, this experience taught him that the past was resistant to change, and someone trying to create change should expect this resistance. Unfortunately, he could never have anticipated that when he goes back in time he will be afflicted with terminal cancer. Jake is able to dismiss the origin of this illness by citing Al’s lifelong smoking habit, allowing him to go optimistically into the past. Jake, too, suffers physical ailments at times related to the changes he wants to make. He has a stomach bug on Halloween in 1958, the day he chooses to stop Frank Dunning from massacring his family the first time. He has a debilitating headache on 11/05/58, the second time he chooses to stop Frank Dunning. In 1963, he is brutally beaten in the weeks before the day Lee Harvey has chosen to assassinate President Kennedy. But it isn’t just physical ailments that attempt to stop Jake. He runs into car trouble, car accidents, a broken stair railing, a resistant wife, and a brutal attack on his girlfriend.

It is not just the big moments of change that experience resistance. When Jake reflects back on his time in the past, he realizes there were little examples of resistance as well. He encouraged a football player to embrace his natural talent as an actor. Not long after, that same football player gets into a car accident that takes the life of his friend and disfigures his girlfriend.

There are consequences to everything Jake does in the past, but he doesn’t begin to recognize this fully until after he saves President Kennedy from Lee Harvey’s bullet. A week after, an earthquake decimates Los Angeles, leaving more than seven thousand people dead. Jake is not aware at the time, but this is just the beginning of a large number of natural disasters that will lead to political unrest in the United States. It is not until he goes through the rabbit-hole once more that he realizes his actions has caused complete anarchy in the world, changing the succession of Presidents in the United States, and leading to the release of nuclear weapons across the world, a rise in terrorism, and a complete breakdown of society.

The Cost of True Love

When the novel begins, Jake is a divorced man who is basically content in his life. He might not consider himself lonely, but he is clearly a man comfortable in his own company. He lives alone with just a cat and has no close friends or local relatives. His work as a schoolteacher is the essence of his life, and he seems content with it. However, he is clearly disillusioned to some degree as he struggles with the quality of the work his students have recently turned in. It is for these reasons that Al has chosen him to continue on with his mission to stop the assassination of President Kennedy.

On his first trip to the past, Jake interacts a great deal with the locals, stopping to ask questions of the workers outside a bar, speaking with Beverly and Richie, and having a long conversation with a bartender. On the second trip, however, he has learned from his mistakes to keep basically to himself. He keeps his interactions to a minimum and gets his work done quickly and quietly. He moves on as soon as his work in Maine is finished, settling in Florida. Jake grows restless and begins teaching. He also begins making bets to build up his savings before moving on to Texas, a decision that will have consequences later. Yet Jake doesn’t seem to equate interacting with the people of the past with these consequences.

In Texas, Jake settles in Jodie and becomes a part of the community. This flows naturally for Jake, and he doesn’t see how his actions are causing consequences for those around him. The consequences come slowly and appear to be a natural part of life. And then Jake falls in love. Sadie Dunhill is a beautiful, clumsy, intelligent woman who fills a space in Jake that he never knew he had. They flow together perfectly, even when his lies and secrets begin to give her pause. In time, Sadie chooses to trust Jake and to believe his insane story of traveling through time. It is a love that is unconditional and mutual. Jake begins to think he might stay in the past with Sadie and live out the rest of his years with her. But this is before he truly appreciates what his presence in the past does to the flow of time and the very fabric of reality.

When Sadie is killed during their attempt to stop the assassination of President Kennedy, Jake is devastated. His thoughts keep returning to the rabbit-hole. He needs to reset time so that Sadie will be alive again. He wants nothing more than a reset, so he can find her and love her again. He dreams of marrying her and having children with her. However, once he learns and appreciates the destruction his presence in the past causes, he knows that just meeting Sadie will set off a ripple of destruction that he cannot control. It takes weeks for Jake to choose between protecting the fabric of reality and indulging in his desire to be with Sadie. It is not an easy choice, but in the end he returns to his own time and puts time travel behind him.

Jake tries to stay away from Sadie and to restrain himself from finding out any new information on her. However, there comes a moment when he can no longer resist. Jake learns that Sadie is still alive and being celebrated in Jodie. He returns to the town where he found so much happiness, marking the changes that have taken place in the past fifty years but also noting the things that remain the same. When he sees Sadie, his feelings for her as strong as they ever were. It seems she feels the same, even though she does not know who he is or remember the things they shared in another timeline. There is clearly a connection there, however, and Sadie welcomes Jake in a way that can only suggest that love transcends everything—even time.