The Long Walk was the first thing I read by King. I was a kid and I loved it. It was in the junior high library and at that time nobody knew Bachman was a pseudonym for King. It remains my favorite of his long works, with the exception of the first half of the first Gunslinger book, and I've read it more times than I can count.
Only one thing about it has ever bothered me.
The Walkers are ordered alphabetically. Ewing is 9. Garraty is 47, which is 38 higher even though there's not a lot of space between names beginning with 'Ew' and 'Ga' and there's only two or three names called out in the book that would fall alphabetically between those two names. it's statistically improbable, to put it mildly.
So why was 47 the number he gave to Garraty?
Was it just personally significant? Did he like how it read? Did he see some athlete with that jersey playing in high school sports and it just stuck? The way I understand it, he wrote The Long Walk before he got into the period of his life he doesn't remember well, but even if he had written it with a head full of boonk and whiskey something tells me he would have noticed the anomaly.
And if that's what it ends up being -- an oversight -- I can live with that. I'm not one of those folks who subscribe to the intentional fallacy and think that what the writer intended to write is what defines canon. You write and it reads how it reads. The Long Walk created a world for me when I read it, and it was a powerful enough one that all these years later I still wonder about 47, even though I'm not one to usually dwell on minutiae. And even these years later I'm still prone to account for anomalies in a way that reflects suspension of disbelief, rather than suspicion of oversight, which kind of says everything there is to say about how much I still love the book.
If there's a deeper significance that underlies the choice, but as an author King's response is 'yeah there is and that's something I'm not interested in chatting about' that, too, is acceptable. Also acceptable: "I left that in as a bit of a mystery. The significance is whatever you make of it, because I never decided why that was his number." It could even be 'wait, what? oh, I never thought of that" -- even though that would surprise me in some ways, in other ways I know that's how it sometimes happens. Basically any answer is acceptable I'm just curious.
Hypotheses are welcome.
Only one thing about it has ever bothered me.
The Walkers are ordered alphabetically. Ewing is 9. Garraty is 47, which is 38 higher even though there's not a lot of space between names beginning with 'Ew' and 'Ga' and there's only two or three names called out in the book that would fall alphabetically between those two names. it's statistically improbable, to put it mildly.
So why was 47 the number he gave to Garraty?
Was it just personally significant? Did he like how it read? Did he see some athlete with that jersey playing in high school sports and it just stuck? The way I understand it, he wrote The Long Walk before he got into the period of his life he doesn't remember well, but even if he had written it with a head full of boonk and whiskey something tells me he would have noticed the anomaly.
And if that's what it ends up being -- an oversight -- I can live with that. I'm not one of those folks who subscribe to the intentional fallacy and think that what the writer intended to write is what defines canon. You write and it reads how it reads. The Long Walk created a world for me when I read it, and it was a powerful enough one that all these years later I still wonder about 47, even though I'm not one to usually dwell on minutiae. And even these years later I'm still prone to account for anomalies in a way that reflects suspension of disbelief, rather than suspicion of oversight, which kind of says everything there is to say about how much I still love the book.
If there's a deeper significance that underlies the choice, but as an author King's response is 'yeah there is and that's something I'm not interested in chatting about' that, too, is acceptable. Also acceptable: "I left that in as a bit of a mystery. The significance is whatever you make of it, because I never decided why that was his number." It could even be 'wait, what? oh, I never thought of that" -- even though that would surprise me in some ways, in other ways I know that's how it sometimes happens. Basically any answer is acceptable I'm just curious.
Hypotheses are welcome.
