1408

Content Warning: The source material features discussions of suicide, self-harm, and distressing imagery. It also includes ableist language, specifically the author’s use of the r-word.

The first major conflict of “1408” exposes the subtle differences between two similar ideas. When Olin challenges Mike’s beliefs, imploring him to heed his warning about room 1408, Mike is forced to admit that he doesn’t believe in the subject matter of his writings. Mike cannot accept the paranormal because he has never encountered it, but he insists that he is open to the possibility that hauntings are real: “I may never win the Pulitzer Prize for investigating The Barking Ghost in Mount Hope Cemetery, but I would have written fairly about him if he had shown up” (373). However, Mike does not require “evidence” to indulge in various superstitious behaviors. In the very first scene, he tells Olin about his “lucky Hawaiian shirt […] the one with the ghost repellent” (367). While Mike’s smile indicates that the latter remark is ironic, he later admits that he attaches quasi-supernatural significance to the shirt; when Olin observes the cigarette that Mike wears behind his ear, Mike confesses that it is “[p]art affectation, part superstition […] Like the Hawaiian shirt” (368). His attachment to the cigarette stems largely from his past as a smoker and the memory of his late brother, who died of lung cancer. Mike believes on some level that wearing it can rescue him from the same fate.

The distinction the story establishes between belief and superstition parallels a split between the rational and irrational—a split best captured by Olin’s remark that room 1408 posed a particular threat to Mike because Mike “believed too much in nothing” (401). The claim appears paradoxical: A belief in nothing would seem to be not so much a belief as the absence of belief. However, the remark hints at an innate human propensity for belief that Mike’s behavior bears out. It is not simply that Mike engages in various superstitious actions, but rather that he transmutes his skepticism into an article of faith—i.e., a belief, which the story suggests is something like the rationalized superstitious instinct.  

Olin further implies that belief typically structures how one experiences reality, noting that ghosts appear to people who believe in ghosts. Room 1408, however, is in some sense a symbol of pure irrationality; items disappear and reappear, images change, and ultimately even the laws of geometry break down, with the room devolving into “swoops and mad tilts” (397). Nevertheless, Mike (irrationally) clings to rationality for as long as he can, his “belief in nothing” rendering him particularly susceptible to the room’s danger. Indeed, it is only when he embraces unthinking superstition that he escapes. Without his lucky cigarette, he might have forgotten about the matchbook, and without nonsensically using the matchbook to set his “lucky” shirt on fire—something he does “without so much as a single thought” (397)—the room’s door would not have opened for him.