43 pages • 1 hour read
Stephen KingThe Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1999A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 14-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 14 Summary: “Bottom of the Ninth: Save Situation”
When a North American Black Bear emerges from the woods, Trisha is almost relieved. However, as the bear draws closer she decides that it is really the God of the Lost in bear form. Clouds of bugs swirl around its face. It tells her to run, but she can barely stand on her weakened legs. Trisha remembers Tom Gordon’s assertion that God intervenes in the bottom of the ninth inning and his secret to winning—establishing that you are the better player. Whispering “icewater” to herself, Trisha steps toward the creature, provoking it to charge her. Again, Trisha again hears the bear telling her to run, but she knows that “stillness [is] her last chance…stillness and maybe a good hard curveball” (290). She understands how Tom Gordon must feel under pressure. The bear creature sniffs at her face; its eyes are insect-infested “tunnels…toward the god’s unimaginable brain” (291) and its throat is full of wasps. Still, she does not move. The creature’s face shifts into the faces of Trisha’s teachers, friends, family, and dangerous strangers. She hears “the hum of its poisoned works” and thinks that this sound is “the real Subaudible” (292). The creature rises onto its hind legs and compels Trisha to look at it. Staring into its empty eyes, she understands that it intends to kill her no matter what.
Palming her Walkman, Trisha gets into the pitching position she learned from watching Tom Gordon. Her sudden movement toward the creature scares it. As it tries to regain its balance, a hunter named Travis Herrick appears and shoots it in the ear. Trisha finishes her pitch. The Walkman hits the creature between the eyes before another gunshot sends it running back into the woods. Trisha staggers toward Travis Herrick, collapsing into his arms. Before she faints, she tries to tell him “I got it, I got the save” (299).
Chapter 15 Summary: “Postgame”
Trisha dreams of meeting Tom Gordon in the meadow again. This time he wears his home uniform; the Red Sox’s road trip is over. Trisha shyly tells him that she closed her game, and Tom tells her she did well. She asks if she was stupid to go off the path. Tom smiles and asks, “what path?” (302).
As her mother’s voice wakes her out of her dream, the image of the woods retreats into a deep part of Trisha, never to leave her again. She’s lying in a hospital bed surrounded by her family—Quilla, Larry, and Pete. She tries to call out to her dad but finds that she cannot speak. A nurse informs her that she has double pneumonia and urges her family out of the room because Trisha’s vital signs are peaking. Larry is the last to leave the room. Trisha signals to him to catch his attention and gestures toward her Red Sox cap. Larry places the cap on her head and she taps the brim before performing Tom Gordon’s victory point. Larry beams at her, and Trisha thinks that if a path does exist, it is in her father’s smiling face.
Chapters 14-15 Analysis
In the Chapter 14, “Bottom of the Ninth: Save Situation,” Trisha finally faces off with the dreaded God of the Lost. By now, the line between her imagination and reality is so blurred that King leaves it open to interpretation whether what she sees is just a bear, rendered horrifying by her feverish mind, or a supernatural creature with empty, evil eyes. Real or not, the God of the Lost is terrifying to Trisha, but she draws on all she has learned from Tom Gordon to maintain her composure. She has found the ice water in her veins and remains still as the bear-creature approaches her, finally understanding how Tom Gordon feels on the pitch. In baseball, a “save situation” occurs when a relief pitcher (like Tom Gordon) has the opportunity to win the game for their team. Getting the save requires pitching a full inning without losing the team’s lead. The title of the chapter lets the reader know that Trisha is “in the lead”—very near salvation—but that this part of the story will determine her fate.
Trisha’s reckoning with her faith reaches a climax during her encounter with the God of the Lost. When the creature approaches her, she hears a strange sound, the “humming of its poisoned works,” and thinks to herself that this sound is “the real Subaudible,” (292). This suggests that she believes not in intangible good but in a latent evil that lurks below the surface of the everyday. King links Trisha’s crisis of faith to her battle with nature explicitly by embodying the sublime—both the terrifying and the divine—in the figure of an American black bear. As the God of the Lost prepares to kill her, Trisha thinks back to Tom Gordon’s assertion that God comes in during the bottom of the ninth inning. This comforting thought helps her stay perfectly still before hurling her Walkman at the creature like a baseball. Salvation does indeed come, thanks to Trisha’s courage and the swift action of a nearby hunter. Trisha’s survival validates her wavering faith, as she defeats both nature and her own fears.
Trisha does not emerge from the woods unscathed. She is very ill with double pneumonia, but the real mark of her experience is mental. Her final Tom Gordon dream ends with Gordon questioning the existence of any path, suggesting that Trisha no longer believes there is a certain way to navigate the random nature of life. When she begins to wake up, the woods recede to an inner part of her, into a darkness which will never again fully leave her. King implies that Trisha’s traumatic experiences will have a lasting impression on her. She cannot forget the dark side of life that she’s witnessed, but she can live with it and move past it. This dramatic loss of innocence mirrors Trisha’s accelerated emotional maturation in the context of her parents’ divorce. The novel ends with Trisha looking into her father’s smiling face and feeling reassured. She knows that if a safe path does exist, it is in his smile, suggesting that the best way to combat the dark, sad and dangerous parts of life is through love and connection with others.
After her encounter with the God of the Lost, Trisha tries to say that she “got the save” (299). Like Tom Gordon, she has triumphed at the last possible moment. Chapter 15 is titled “Postgame” because the gameplay is over and Trisha has won. The novel ends with the words “game over,” bringing the overarching structure of a baseball game to a close.
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By Stephen King
