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.
Literary Devices
Static Character
Content Warning: This section refers to addiction.
In contrast to dynamic characters, static characters don’t change over the course of a story. They remain fixed points, highlighting other characters’ arcs or adding to a story’s tension or atmosphere. Static antagonists are common in horror stories, especially since these villains and monsters often represent concepts rather than fully fleshed-out characters.
In “Quitters, Inc.,” the firm’s employees are all static characters. Donatti is the story’s monster, an uncompromising and unchanging force that is suddenly injected into Morrison’s life. By remaining static, Donatti forces Morrison’s internal conflict forward, pushing the protagonist to the point where refusing to change could literally end up killing him. Likewise, Junk is a static, flat character and an enforcer who is there to do a single, violent job, and the receptionist contributes to the sense of unease in the scenes at Quitters, Inc.
Dark Satire
Satire is a term often associated with comedy or farce, but its critical element is the use of critique, often through caricature and ironic comparisons. Since the satirical attitude incorporates ridicule, it often goes hand in hand with humor, but laughter is not an essential component of the form. This is particularly the case for dark satires, which focus on more troubling or heavy subject matters.
King employs satire throughout “Quitters, Inc.” to critique behavioral psychology and illuminate the difficulty of overcoming addiction. These satirical elements include the story’s ironic comparison between behavioral psychologists and mob goons and a crude caricature of the 12-step program, in which Donatti lays out escalating punishments for each cigarette smoked. These details don’t provoke laughter, but the text mocks behaviorism and recovery programs in a way that recasts their aims and values. Through satire, King aims to interrogate ideas about real social institutions.
Close Third-Person Perspective
Horror benefits from the use of limited narrative perspectives like the close third person or first person. Placing the reader directly in the mind of the protagonist not only helps build an emotional association with the character but also restricts the reader’s understanding of the information the protagonist knows. This creates tension and suspense through anticipation and incomplete information; as King himself said in his nonfiction book Danse Macabre, “What’s behind the door or lurking at the top of the stairs is never as frightening as the door or the staircase itself” (King, Stephen. Danse Macabre. Futura, 1982, p. 133).
In the case of “Quitters, Inc.,” King uses a close third-person perspective, confining the reader to Morrison’s point of view. This creates direct insight into his struggle with cigarette addiction as King reveals how compulsively Morrison thinks about cigarettes, and it builds the story’s suspense by trapping the reader alongside Morrison as he is forced through Quitters, Inc.’s program. For example, Morrison does not know what McCann went through when he receives the business card from him, and he is surprised by his empty house after he smokes his first cigarette on the program.
Repetition
Repetition is the consistent use of a specific word or phrase in a particular work to create a specific effect. In “Quitters, Inc.,” King uses repetition to evoke a sense of the addictive experience. The word “cigarette” is used no less than 40 times in the story, often in the context of yearning or desire. While that fact might seem obvious in the context of the story’s plot, its rhetorical effect shouldn’t be understated. The word is used over and over again in the rising action, only to vanish from the text after the climax except for two brief mentions—when Morrison assures Donatti that he “ha[sn’t] had a cigarette” and in his encounter with the “crony” whom he refers to Quitters, Inc. near the story’s conclusion (342). As Morrison works through his recovery, the word vanishes from his internal narrative. Another word that is repeated frequently is “pragmatic,” and this repetition gives the word an ironic gloss as the cruelty behind Donatti’s methods is revealed.
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