43 pages • 1 hour read
Stephen KingA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
The first sentence of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon reads, “The world had teeth and it could bite you with them any time it wanted” (1). With this bleak pronouncement, King sets up one of the novel’s central themes: Life is unfair. Just as there is love and kindness in the world, there is also senseless darkness and cruelty, and the key to navigating the darkness is not losing hope. Trisha’s ordeal in the woods opens her eyes to the ways the world can be cruel to the innocent. She survives by accepting her unjust circumstances and forging ahead anyway.
As children of divorce, Trisha and Pete struggle to accept that their lives are negatively impacted by a decision that was entirely out of their control. The divorce is a major point of contention between Pete and Quilla; the last sentence Trisha hears her brother shout before she gets lost is “[I] don’t know why we have to pay for what you guys did wrong” (21). In the woods, Trisha quickly realizes that there are worse things in life than divorced parents. Despite her bravery and resourcefulness, the world bares its teeth again and again, taking Trisha to the cusp of death. As she fights to keep her body nourished and her mind sane, her forced isolation gives her plenty of time to reflect on the life she has left behind in Malden. She thinks of her father often, realizing that he is an isolated man living alone and struggling with alcoholism. Her reflections lead her to the conclusion that “life could be very sad…and mostly it was what it could be” (192). Unlike Pete, who loudly protests every perceived injustice, Trisha thinks that the best thing to do is accept this unchangeable fact.
Shortly after her revelation, Trisha hallucinates a message from The God of the Lost, a terrifying creature that represents pure, random evil. It tells her that “the world is a worst-case scenario” (197) and that all of her fears are justified. Even after the hallucination disappears, Trisha can’t shake the feeling that the God of the Lost is following her. Her awareness of the creature grows along with her doubt that she will survive. The God of the Lost embodies the unfair and terrifying darkness of life—it targets Trisha seemingly without reason, and she is sure that if it catches her, it will consume her too. Trisha thinks of this act of consumption as being physically eaten by the creature, but it can also be read as her surrendering to her fears and losing all hope.
Although the odds seem impossibly stacked against her, Trisha pushes past despair time and time again, in part because she allows herself to confront the darkness directly. She is helped by her rich inner life. Warm memories of her family and friends bolster her spirit, as does the imagined advice from Tom Gordon. She survives because she is able to preserve hope and happiness even in the darkest of moments, refusing to be completely swallowed by her fear. After days of evading the God of the Lost, Trisha finally comes face-to-face with the creature, her final trial before she is saved. Looking directly into the face of fear personified, she manages to keep her composure and drive the creature away. Her victory signifies her triumph over the darkness of life.
In the final chapter of the novel, Trisha has one more dream about meeting Tom Gordon in the woods. She asks him if she was stupid to step off the path, and he responds, “what path?” (302). When she wakes up, the dream of the woods recedes into “some darkness which would never entirely leave her now—what path?” (303). The lingering question suggests that Trisha will never again be completely certain of her own safety. She now knows that danger can hide beneath the surface of ordinary things and that sadness is an unavoidable part of the human experience.
After waking up in the hospital, Trisha shares a tender moment with her father. When she looks at his smiling face, full of love and pride, she thinks that “if there was a path, it was there” (306). Although she will never forget what she has experienced over the past nine days, she finds safety and happiness in the love of her family. With this closing image, King suggests that although we cannot escape life’s pitfalls and tragedies, we can overcome them by choosing to appreciate the goodness around us.
In Trisha’s trials, King explores the complex nature of faith through the eyes of a child. Her spiritual journey demonstrates how faith can be tested or strengthened by adverse circumstances, and how it can help carry a person through hard times. Trisha was raised in a secular household—her mother is “a lapsed catholic” and her father “never had anything to lapse from” (79). After getting lost in the woods, she tries to turn to God for guidance like her role model Tom Gordon but finds herself “without vocabulary” (79). As she tries to keep her hope of rescue alive, Trisha’s faith that someone or something is looking out for her is tested but never lost. Her latent conviction that she will be saved by something helps her survive by motivating her to keep pushing herself toward the possibility of rescue.
At the start of the novel, Trisha half-seriously prays to God to send a distraction which will interrupt Quilla and Pete’s fighting. As she expects, her prayer goes unanswered. After being lost in the woods for some time, she tries to pray again, this time in earnest, asking to be rescued. She finds that the act feels inauthentic because she has no connection to any religious practice. Racking her brain for helpful memories, she recalls her father’s description of the Subaudible, an intangible force for good that prevents most disasters and keeps the balance of the world tipped more toward good than evil. However, she does not find this idea as comforting as that of a benevolent and powerful God watching over her.
As Trisha’s situation grows more dire, her desire to believe in something beyond herself grows stronger. Her hallucination of the three robed messengers by the stream explores her feelings toward various belief systems. The first messenger, from “the God of Tom Gordon,” (194) represents a traditional Judeo-Christian God. The messenger informs Trisha that this God is too busy with the world’s catastrophes to save her. This pronouncement taps into the common spiritual anxiety that individuals are too insignificant to be important to a higher power, and therefore alone in their struggles. The second messenger represents the Subaudible, a concept introduced by Trisha’s father. The Subaudible regretfully informs Trisha that he is very weak and cannot help her, reflecting Trisha’s fear that the evils she has recently uncovered are more powerful than the good in the world. The final messenger Trisha meets is from the God of the Lost. In contrast to the other two powers, the God of the Lost cares about her very much. In fact, it considers her “its miracle.” This messenger confirms that there is indeed something looking out for Trisha, but not in the way she hoped.
In the absence of a divine intervention, Trisha has to try her best to save herself, which she does by dragging her weakened body on toward the hope of finding civilization. After going days without any protein, she catches and kills a small trout. Staring at the raw fish, she bemusedly asks God what she should do next. This time, the appeal feels authentic, and she receives an answer in the form of her body’s impulse to eat the raw fish, restoring her energy. In contrast to the terrifying God of the Lost, King interrogates what of the divine may exist in nature and man’s natural impulses.
In Chapter 9, “Top of the Seventh,” Tom Gordon tells Trisha that it is “God’s nature to come in on the bottom of the ninth,” (214). In baseball, the bottom of the ninth is the second part of a game’s final inning. The term is also used in a broader context to refer to situations where there is not much time left to reach a resolution. As Tom Gordon is an extension of Trisha’s mind, his encouragement suggests that a part of her still believes that God is still looking out for her and will intervene when she needs it the most. This belief, however deeply buried, helps her keep going despite her worsening illness and mental exhaustion.
In the end, Trisha is indeed saved in the final innings of her game, just when it seems that all hope is lost. Facing the God of the Lost in all of its horrific power, she is once again comforted by the idea that God will intervene on her behalf when all other options are exhausted. Her ability to stand up to the God of the Lost and emerge victorious validates her faith in both herself and in a benevolent higher power. King ends Trisha’s ordeal with a deus ex machina, meaning “god from the machine”, a literary device in which a seemingly hopeless situation is resolved absolutely by an unexpected force. Just as Trisha overcomes her fear, a hunter emerges from the woods and frightens the bear away. Through this device, King connects Trisha’s personal triumph to the seemingly random nature of salvation: Did Trisha somehow earn her rescue, or was it another instance of fate? In her hospital bed, she once again imitates Tom Gordon’s upward point, suggesting that she now feels the connection to God that was absent at the start of the novel.
Trisha’s story does not provide a concrete answer to the question of whether humans can rely on a higher power to look out for us. Instead, her journey explores the complexity of belief and reminds the reader that faith in something—whether it’s God, the Subaudible, or oneself—can be a source of strength and comfort.
The classic literary conflict of Man versus Nature structures much of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. Although Trisha navigates many dangers of the natural world, King partially subverts this trope to show that nature can also be a force for good.
Before the events of the novel, Trisha enjoys an average middle-class life. Although her family dynamic bothers her, she never has to think twice about her safety. After she steps off the Appalachian trail, however, King thrusts her into a hostile wilderness. Nature seems to be out to get her from the start, with biting and stinging insects and inclement weather complicating her attempts to find her way back to the trail. The dramatic stakes rise gradually as Trisha spends more time lost in the woods. Her struggle against her surroundings becomes an all-out battle for survival. She is sickened by unfiltered stream water and the elements, weakened by a lack of food and water, and stalked through the woods by a sinister creature that may or may not be a bear. As her fears multiply, she often projects her unease onto the world around her, seeing ordinary aspects of nature as sinister. King highlights this mindset through figurative language. Seen through Trisha’s eyes, a broken branch becomes the stump of a severed arm, and the moon is the empty eye of an indifferent God.
Early on in her journey through the wilderness, Trisha remembers Quilla’s advice not to slap at mosquitos when they swarm her, as this will only make it worse. This piece of advice is symbolic of a larger dynamic. Expending valuable energy to fight against her surroundings will not help Trisha. In order to survive, she has to learn to work with nature instead of against it. While he imbues Trisha’s surroundings with plenty of danger, King makes the point that the natural world is not inherently dark or hostile. Although her paranoia and hallucinations make the woods seem full of horrors, nature is not specifically in opposition to Trisha. With the exception of the God of the Lost, her surroundings are neutral; the forest simply exists, and it is up to Trisha to make the best of it. Sometimes this entails accepting a relatively small consequence over a larger one—for example, although her choice to drink stream water sickens her, it likely saves her from dying of dehydration. When she runs out of food from her pack, she learns to be grateful for the small mercies of her environment, like a clump of edible ferns or a checkerberry bush appearing just when hunger threatens to overwhelm her.
Amidst her nine miserable days in the woods, Trisha experiences moments of true inner peace. She delights in watching various creatures, like beavers and deer, cavorting in the landscape around her. As she watches several butterflies dancing in a sunny clearing, she experiences “her life’s greatest contentment” (190) and realizes that she will never be able to tell anyone else how happy the sight makes her feel. Along with providing her moments of pure joy, being alone in nature forces Trisha to rely on her instincts and develop her belief in herself She goes from someone with a rudimentary knowledge of nature to someone with a deep respect and understanding of the natural world and emerges from the woods a stronger and wiser character than she was before she entered them.
By Stephen King