The Mist

“He was circling the lake, coming toward the Bridgton side, toward us, and all the houses and cottages and summer places were bursting into purple-white flame like lightning, and soon the smoke covered everything.”

The mist does not care about the individuals that it affects. While everyone in Bridgton has their own opinions about locals and the people who come from out-of-town, the mist affects everyone the same. Houses that have belonged to the same families for generations are swallowed up as quickly as the summer houses only occupied for a few weeks every year. Rich or poor, man or woman, everyone is bound together in opposition to the horrifying unknown lurking inside the mist. In this sense, terror is a great social leveler.

“Shooting atoms into the air and all that.”

No explanation is ever given for the arrival of the mist. While people like Mrs. Carmody insist that it is divine punishment, others hint at the science experiments on the nearby military base. While the scientific explanations might be less supernatural, their secondhand nature means they are filtered through numerous layers of misunderstanding. David and his neighbors do not understand the science of what might have occurred, so explanations such as “shooting atoms into the air” (19) seem just as supernatural as Mrs. Carmody’s apocalyptic visions. Either way, humans are dealing with forces they cannot understand.

“I haven’t seen my wife since then.”

David’s narration occasionally switches from past tense to present tense. These switches increase the dramatic tension in the story, reminding the audience that he is narrating to them from a point in the future that is drawing inevitably closer. The frank brutality of his momentary switch also reminds the audience that this is less a story and more of a confession. David will never see Steff again, and the thought will haunt him for the rest of his life. These small moments and memories take on greater significance in David’s mind, and he passes this significance on to the audience through his use of literary techniques.

“When the electricity goes off, it catches you in a hundred different ways.”

David’s experiences in the supermarket remind him of the fragility of humans’ existence. The people in the store are denied the usual comforts of their lives. These people take inventions and pleasures like electricity for granted so, when they lose access to these things, they become helpless. Without televisions, radios, telephones, or even air conditioning, the people in the store are faced with a stark reminder that they are ill-equipped for existence in a brutal world, even without the horrors lurking in the mist.

“That sort of language is rougher than I’d like Billy to hear.”

David is faced with a moment of cognitive dissonance. His house was nearly destroyed in a storm, and he feels the rising sense of dread at the uncanniness of the world around him. Deep within himself, David is sure that something is wrong with the world. However, he is still worried about Billy hearing inappropriate language. Even in a moment of existential dread, David turns to his familiar parenting concerns. These everyday concerns are a comforting distraction from having to think about the reality of his situation. David is not really worried about Brent’s cursing, but he is thankful that he has something so normal and typical to worry about.

“Get back here with that stuff, you’re shoplifting!”

Faced with the terror of the unknown, people turn to various coping mechanisms. Inside the supermarket, some men turn to alcohol, numbing their thoughts so they do not need to worry about what is outside. For the supermarket manager Bud Brown, chiding people for shoplifting is comfortingly familiar. By focusing on the known, understandable, and familiar crime of shoplifting, he does not need to worry about the unknown horrors trapping him in the store. The novel portrays the human tendency to latch on to something recognizable in times of great stress, even if those things are not useful.

“Solving the problem would help make them feel less confused and helpless.”

The men are worried about whatever is outside in the mist, but they do not want to admit to each other or themselves that they are scared. Instead, they focus on an easier problem that they know how to fix. The generator provides them with the comforts of modern existence, such as air conditioning, food freezers, and lights. Fixing the generator feels like something that they might need to do on a regular day. By assigning themselves this task, they “feel less confused and helpless” (39). The men seek out familiar problems to distract themselves from unfamiliar problems.

“I don’t know how long I would have gone on punching him, but someone grabbed my arms.”

During the incident with the generator and the bag boy, David’s masculinity is questioned. The other local men demean him as a mere artist who does not know about machines, bravery, or anything else that fits their traditional conception of what makes a man. After these men are proved resoundingly wrong, David responds with violence. Ironically, his violent response does adhere to these men’s idea of masculinity. By beating them, David expresses his anger at the loss of Norm’s life and takes revenge for the insult against him. He feels vindicated, not only because he was right about the dangerous situation but also because his actions make him feel more masculine than the men who stood by and watched as a man died. In turn, his victim takes David’s punches as a form of penance and as a way to admit his mistakes.

“I only pay my taxes and spend my money here!”

Brent cannot conceive of a form of community integration that is not financial. He fits the mold of the typical out-of-town resident that the local people of Bridgton dislike. He is not part of the community, does not know anyone, and feels no sense of social integration other than his disputes over property lines with David. The irony of this dynamic is that the townspeople also consider David an outsider due to his professional connections with New York. Brent rages against the way the town perceives him and, in doing so, demonstrates that he lacks any awareness of the subtleties of the community, thereby proving that they are right to consider him an outsider.

“The end of everything. It’s the Last Times.”

The situation inside the supermarket is beyond the comprehension of the victims. They exist in a vacuum of information, desperately searching for a cohesive explanation of what is happening to them. In this kind of situation, something as nonsensical as Mrs. Carmody’s apocalyptic ramblings begin to appeal to them. While she was previously dismissed as unreliable, the fact that her ramblings offer some kind of explanation is comforting. The people in the supermarket would rather have a wrong explanation than none at all, so the sincerity and forcefulness of Mrs. Carmody provide them with what they need. They may not believe that they are living in the “Last Times” (51), but they are desperate to believe that someone understands what is happening to them.

“For all we knew, the Eastern Seaboard might no longer exist.”

The majority of the narrative in The Mist is confined to the supermarket. David keeps his imagination limited to his immediate surroundings as projecting his situation outward is terrifying for him. David wants to focus on his immediate surroundings, as thinking about Steff or the rest of the world fills him with dread. Steff is likely dead, he knows, and the rest of the world may be shrouded in the same deadly mist. These pessimistic thoughts are distractions that seep into David’s mind when he is stressed or tired. He forces himself to ignore these thoughts so that he can continue to protect himself, Billy, and the others. David limits his imagination as a coping mechanism so he does not have to confront the likelihood that almost everything he loves is gone.

“God will keep your Steffy, and Alan, too.”

Mrs. Carmody is the most obvious representation of religious fervor in The Mist. However, she is not alone in turning to religion in difficult moments. Mrs. Turman also relies on her Christian beliefs for support and guidance, and she shares these beliefs with David. Mrs. Turman’s religion is different from the religion of Mrs. Carmody. Whereas Mrs. Carmody is forceful and direct in her beliefs, Mrs. Turman is reactive. Mrs. Carmody wants to act to appease God’s anger, while Mrs. Turman relies on God’s benevolence for comfort and protection. These two interpretations of the same religion hint at the role of humans in the manifestation of belief. Working with the same material, two women from the same town can infer different interpretations of the same religion with disastrous consequences.

“The mind is a monkey.”

The danger faced by the people trapped inside the supermarket forces them to regress into a more animalistic state. Without the comforts of modern life, such as telephones and electricity, the people in the supermarket lose touch with their sense of humanity. They indulge their impulses, feeling the need to drink or have sex without consequences. This search for pleasure or comfort is a search for any kind of sensation in a moment when they feel in mortal danger. They adopt a “monkey” (65) mindset, losing the manners, obligations, and ability to reason, separating them from more primitive creatures.

“I was developing an uncomfortably strong feeling for her—uncomfortable but not exactly unpleasant.”

David does not want to acknowledge the true danger he faces. He knows that Steff is probably dead, but he forces himself not to think about the truth. He denies himself an imagination or the ability to speculate. Instead, he searches for any kind of sensual affirmation he can find. David is attracted to Amanda, and he allows himself to focus on her for a moment; he would rather betray his marriage in a sexual way than acknowledge that his marriage is probably finished because of Steff’s death. Sensual pleasure is “not exactly unpleasant” (71) because it is an atavistic, immediate distraction from reality.

“It turned out I wasn’t as good as he was.”

David has spent his entire life dealing with the burden of expectation. His famous father set a standard for artistry in the family that David has never quite reached. Instead, he accepted the practical requirements of reality and became a commercial artist; he was willing to make sacrifices to benefit his family. As such, David’s family has become the art project he could never quite paint, functioning as the total of his life’s work. This realization illustrates the stakes of the situation. David is desperate to protect Billy because he knows that he has already lost Steff, while his failure to protect his family hurts him because it is another instance of him failing to measure up to the standards set by his father.

“There were kids in Nam who used to take ears. I was there. I saw it.”

Ollie points to his traumatic experiences in the Vietnam War as preparation for what he is enduring in the supermarket. The subtle association between the American military’s involvement in brutal wars overseas and the Arrowhead Project near Bridgton suggests to Ollie that the trauma is all linked. The Army habitually crosses boundaries and teaches young men how to transgress in a destructive manner. He is not surprised that the military might inflict something as terrible as the mist on the world because he has seen the reality of what they can accomplish. The Vietnam War offers a traumatic template for what is happening in Bridgton, a brutal situation in which people lose their humanity.

“In the darkness she was nothing but a shape.”

David and Amanda have sex as a distraction. Together in the small office, trapped inside a supermarket and staring death in the face, they have an urge to feel something. The immediate physical pleasure of sex is a distraction from their trauma. Rather than think about their family or loved ones, they can lose themselves in one another for a moment. The relationship is more internal than external: for David, Amanda becomes a blank shape onto which he can project his guilt and fear for Steff, as well as his desire to be with her again. Amanda is similarly distant, calling out the name of another man. David and Amanda use one another as distractions from the horror of their situation.

“Do you want to make your son an orphan?”

Mrs. Carmody is no longer the slightly strange old woman David once considered her to be. By the novel’s closing chapters, she has become a menacing figure who knows how to target a person’s worst fears. When she confronts David, she attacks his feelings of inadequacy and guilt. She knows that he feels guilty about losing Steff and is terrified of losing Billy, so she issues a subtle threat. By making his son an orphan, she implies to David that he will leave Billy vulnerable to attack. There will be no one around to protect Billy, least of all from Mrs. Carmody herself. Mrs. Carmody does not just threaten David’s life; she threatens him with the consequences of his death.

“But the moment’s spell she had created was broken, and Amanda’s eyes never wavered.”

Mrs. Carmody is as much a supernatural evil as anything outside the supermarket. She casts fragile and brittle spells, which can be broken but require people to stand up to her. Her ramblings are attractive to the people searching for an explanation for their predicament, but a well-timed intervention can shatter their appeal. However, as the situation worsens, fewer and fewer people are willing to intervene. More people want to accept Mrs. Carmody’s simple explanation of the inexplicable events. The true spell that Mrs. Carmody can cast is to appeal to people’s fundamental desire to know what is happening, even if the explanation they receive is wrong. An incorrect explanation is preferable to them compared to no explanation at all.

“Amanda told me I talked a lot, and screamed once or twice, but I remember no dreams.”

David does not remember his nightmares because, compared to the situation in which he finds himself, they are not worth remembering. His imagination cannot compete with the horrors he has witnessed while awake, nor can he imagine a worse situation than losing his wife and potentially losing his son. Even if David is screaming in his sleep, he cannot remember his dreams because he wakes up to find himself in an even more horrific situation. David now lives inside his worst nightmare.

“She seemed to need no sleep.”

The more time she spends in the store, the more Mrs. Carmody seems to take on supernatural qualities of her own. David is exhausted and unsure of what is happening to him, so he feels horrified that Mrs. Carmody possesses both unerring surety of what is happening and a seemingly unending amount of energy. She becomes everything he is not, emerging as an almost-otherworldly threat inside the supermarket to match the otherworldly threat outside the supermarket. The more Mrs. Carmody seems removed from David, the more he feels surrounded by monsters inside and outside the building.

“Get his whore, too!”

Mrs. Carmody demands a human sacrifice to appease her God and end the situation in which the people find themselves. She does not name David, but her choices for the sacrifice very clearly target David and his allies. She points to Billy and Amanda, calling on her followers to kill them. She refers to Amanda as “his whore” (96), and the pronoun refers to David without mentioning him by name. In Mrs. Carmody’s view, Amanda is a possession of David and functions as an extension of him. By attacking Amanda and referring to her in this possessive manner, Mrs. Carmody targets David without ever mentioning him directly.

“There were four of us in the Scout, but if push came right down to shove, I’d find some other way out for myself.”

In the most difficult situation, David still thinks of others before himself. He counts out the bullets in the gun and realizes that he only has enough to kill the others rather than allowing them to experience the pain of being attacked by the monsters. In this moment, a quick and clean death is a gift only to be given to a select few, and David places the needs of others over himself. David never explicitly states that this is his plan because—as ever—he does not want to give voice to the reality of his situation. However, these thoughts linger in his subconscious, revealing his fundamentally altruistic personality, even in the face of certain death.