Summary: Within Pet Sematary, by Stephen King; pages 71-132, you learn more about the main character Louis Creed and his family. After the night of his encounter with the recently deceased, Victor Pascow, Louis returns back to work at the university and does research about Pascow. Then, he meets his new co-workers and eats lunch and works on patients, but after work he goes across the read to Jud’s house to pay him a visit.
While at Jud’s house, they talking about Jud’s wife, Norma and her arthritis condition and there Jud asks Louis if he would take a look at her condition for free and because Louis is a doctor and a friend. A week later, within the book, it is Halloween and the Creed family is gathering at Jud’s house, but while at his house there is an accident; Norma fell. After Norma’s accident, Jud tells Louis the actual story behind the pet cemetery, how in the 1800’s, it use to be a burial ground for the Micmac’s, but then an evil Windago came and soured the land.
Jud believes that it was a tall tail and that the Micmac’s practiced cannibalism and the pet cemetery is where they buried their “meals”. So, the story is, if you bury someone who has died within the pet cemetery; they will come back to life. Now being middle of the story you find out with the pet cemetery actually is, rather than a place to bury your deceased pets. Journal 2-D D: While reading Stephen King’s novel Pet Sematary, two main themes comes to mind; death and life.
Throughout the novel so far from pages 71 to 20 you see Stephen King’s perspective of how mankind hands with the loss of a person or an animal. He also expresses the grieving process from all different kinds of emotional stages, from denial to shock to guilt to anger then finally acceptance. The theme of death, is seen everywhere in the media, and seeing two different sides of the theme changes my opinion on death. Having a cematary itself, within the novel is a way he expresses death.
At the pet cematary there are dozens of different graves made by young kids after their pets have died; this could be considered as a step of acceptance of death, seeing how the children buried their animals allowing them to pass on. Another example would be the stories Jud would tell to Louis of the different pets that have been killed and how the children sometimes cried for days or even denied that they had passed away, page 84 “Anyway, that was the end if Billy’s bad dreams about the Pet Sematary.
He mourned his dog and finished his mourning and got on…” this shows another step in the griving process, denial then acceptance of his loss. In the media, death is sometimes portrayed more as a mystery rather than a statement. In newspapers, movies and books, death is given an eerie persona, something anti-understandable, strange, frightening, unexplainable, or even thrill seeking, even in Pet Sematary, death has these qualties.
In Pet Sematary, death of a closefriend/ animals is more straight forward; a love one dies, family/friend/owner mournes the death, and they move on, while in the media they only explain that a love one has died and not describing anything beyond that. When viewing this comparision, I personally can say there is more to death than just recognizing it. There are multiple steps after a experiencing a death rather than going straight to acceptance. The media just shows the important pieces , while in Pet Sematary it shows the important piece and steps toward acceptance.
The main theme in Pet Sematary by Stephen King, is death and expressing its grieving process between people and pets. Throughout his novel he shows variority of different steps and ways the people of the town copped with their deathes, whether it was with anger, denial, shock, or accecptance. Then, how the media protrayes death by showing only the critical points and comparing that to how Stephen King showed the critcal points with a step process to accetptance of a death.
