31 pages • 1 hour read
Stephen KingQuitters Inc.
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1978A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Stephen King and Addiction
Content Warning: This section includes discussions of addiction and animal abuse.
Stephen King was born in Portland, Maine, on September 21, 1947, to a working-class New England household. King’s father, a World War II veteran and a traveling vacuum salesman, had an alcohol addiction and left the family when King was two years old, leaving his mother to raise him and his brother alone. Despite this, King’s father had an outsized impact on the author’s career; as a child, King came across a box of his father’s old paperbacks in the attic and realized that he wanted to be a writer.
Despite resenting his father’s absence and addiction, King drank heavily throughout his youth, a habit that worsened in college. He began using drugs when his career took off, and he was introduced to cocaine at one of the first Hollywood parties he attended. He began writing about cocaine during the late 1970s and mid-1980s, and today, post-recovery, he often cites the drug as the reason for the volume and incoherence of much of his work in the period. He famously wrote The Running Man over the course of one week, and in his 2000 memoir On Writing, he notes that he barely remembers writing his 1981 novel Cujo. His 1987 novel Misery is a metaphor for drug addiction. The book’s antagonist, Annie Wilkes, represents cocaine as she imprisons protagonist Paul Sheldon, sets his manuscript on fire, and maims him.
King married his wife, Tabitha, an author herself, after graduating from the University of Maine. He credits Tabitha with launching his writing career, not only through financial support in their early years together but also by rescuing the first three pages of his debut novel, Carrie, from the garbage. King had thrown them out in a fit of writer’s block. Tabitha was also integral to King’s recovery from drug addiction, as she staged an intervention for him in the late 1980s. King was confronted with the harm his addiction was causing the people closest to him, and although he wrote “Quitters, Inc.” almost a decade before his own recovery, the story is prescient in its message that love is integral to overcoming addiction.
Cultural Context: Behavioral Psychology
Stephen King’s body of work has a complicated relationship with psychology. As someone dealing with addiction himself, King was nevertheless skeptical of recovery programs. His work is often critical of psychoanalysis, often framing it as unhelpful at best and openly malicious at worst. Behavioral therapy, a psychological approach that was popular among addiction treatment programs in the 1960s and 1970s, was a particular concern of his and has been consistently portrayed in his work (as it is in “Quitters, Inc.”) as outright villainous and sadistic.
The umbrella of behavioral therapy covers a wide range of treatment methods that, at their roots, focus on various forms of conditioning and modification. The main idea is to focus on a person’s behaviors rather than their mental state; negative behaviors are seen as practical problems that can be unlearned through conditioning methods. These include positive reinforcement, in which someone receives a reward for good behavior; negative reinforcement, in which someone avoids a negative outcome when they perform an action; positive punishment, in which someone receives a negative stimulus when they perform an action; and negative punishment, in which something is taken away in response to an action. In “Quitters, Inc.,” the punishment inflicted on Morrison’s wife is an example of positive punishment.
Though noble in their aims, this focus on behavior modification had its roots in and ultimately led to many controversial high-profile experiments. One of the field’s chief pioneers, B.F. Skinner, became famous in the 1930s for his “Skinner Box,” an electrical shock device similar to Donatti’s rabbit zapper that Skinner used on rats to demonstrate the power of conditioning. These experiments were expanded upon in the 1960s by Martin Seligman, who demonstrated the principle of learned helplessness in his research on aversion therapy, shocking dogs on various platforms until they gave up trying to escape. The infamous and much-publicized Milgram experiment on obedience and punishment subjected the study’s participants to psychological abuse by forcing them to believe they were administering electrical shocks to innocent people.
“Quitters, Inc.,” published during the heyday of behavioral therapy, levels a biting critique of behaviorism’s practitioners if not its underlying ideology. King satirizes the practice by linking behavioral therapy to mob violence through Donatti’s system of positive punishment. Additionally, Quitters, Inc. is likened to a cult, with its terrorized members recruiting new victims to the program with incomplete information and grandiose promises.
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