53 pages • 1 hour read
Billy Summers
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Themes
The Fluidity of Identity and Self
Billy Summers is deeply invested in questions of identity: how people form identities and how (or if) they can relinquish them. Billy’s stint in Red Bluff is described as his “season of many identities” (96). On the most basic level, this refers to the various aliases and false identities that characters assume in this novel. Few of the central characters have only one name. Giorgio is also known as Georgie Pigs, Frank is also Frankie Elvis, Alice becomes Elizabeth Anderson, Bucky’s real name is Elmer, and Billy himself has numerous identities, including David Lockridge and Dalton Smith. The characters in Billy’s book sometimes bear the names of their real-world counterpart, and sometimes Billy masks them with invented names. Identities also flow between people. At one point Billy confuses Hoff with Foss, a CIA man in Fallujah, and he reflects of Alice that “He doesn’t need a psychiatrist to tell him what she means to him; she’s a version of Cathy only grown up” (286).
In addition to these named identities, different aspects of characters emerge throughout the book. Billy has a “dumb self” introduced in the very first chapter and a “child self” who begins to emerge through his writing. Likewise, Billy’s aliases become sites for suppressed aspects of his personality to flourish. Billy thinks that Bucky might be “his better self out here” in the mountains (374), away from New York, and that he “knows that Alice is [better there]” (374).
As fluid as identity is, it is not completely rewritable. When Bucky creates the identity of Elizabeth Anderson for Alice, she is surprised that he has chosen a name for her and asks why she can’t come up with her own alias. Bucky replies, “It’s better that you don’t. Too easy to pick one that links to your past” (291). In some cases, the persistence of past selves is cause for hope. In Sidewinder, Bucky goes by the name Elmer Randolph: “my real first name and my middle” (298), he explains. In his hideaway and his retirement, Bucky thus becomes more himself than he was in his role as broker for hired killers. At other points, the past’s presence is more ambivalent. When Alice begins her new life, she plans to “rent a safe deposit box and put [the thumb drive] inside with [her] Alice Maxwell ID” (431). Her old identity may be symbolically locked away, but it is not gone. When Billy tells Alice that she “can be a new person. If you want to” (283), it seems like an invitation to leave the past behind. If Billy’s own story tells readers anything, it is that leaving the past behind is not that simple.
In the context of this mercurial play on aliases, shared names, mistaken names, and invented names, it is significant that the novel itself bears a character’s name, as though attempting to sum up his identity in the diverse stories of his life. When Alice plans the future publication of Billy’s book, she also imagines calling it Billy Summers: The Story of a Lost Man. This insistent naming of a central character who goes by many names seems like an effort to consolidate an identity fragmented by violence, trauma, and loss—something Alice’s title recognizes, pinning Billy down even while recognizing that he is “lost,” beyond the reach of decisive understanding.
Repressed Violence and Trauma
The novel’s structure brings the past into the present through the nesting of one “novel” or book (the one written by Billy Summers) inside King’s novel. This is figured as an exercise in recuperating a past that might otherwise be lost, whether because it is cloaked in silence or because it is repressed and unremembered. Billy’s writing brings the past and present into contact, revealing patterns and repetitions; for example, by helping Alice with her panic attacks, he recalls the breathing of injured or panicking men in Iraq.
Writing also unearths things that Billy didn’t know he knew. For example, he reflects that “Before starting to write, he would have said Yes I remember what happened, but only a little” but that the process of setting his story down has “unlocked a door and opened a window” (49). The practice is almost explicitly therapeutic. This becomes clearer still when Billy considers the significance of creating a pseudonym for himself within this autobiographical text: Benjy Compson is “just enough not-Billy so Billy can look at painful memories he usually avoids” (78). Through his writing, he lets his repressed “child self” speak and, in doing so, records traumas that he had not previously confronted. This is evident, for example, in the following passage, where the repeated refrain of “no one asked” (transitioning to “no one knew”) describes the loneliness of a traumatized child:
No one asked how it felt to be told take care of your sister and fail […] No one asked how it felt when you held your wet hand in front of your sister’s mouth and nose […] No one ever knew that the gun’s recoil had made him burp as if he had done no more than drink a soda past (97).
Here the terrible (the guilt of failure, the horror of searching for breath from a dead mouth) mingles with the banal (the image of a boy drinking soda).
The past’s intrusions into the present are not always therapeutic. Both Alice and Billy are tormented by dreams of violent events. Alice’s attack comes back to her in fragments in the same apartment in which Billy is reliving his tour of duty in Iraq. One episode sees Billy’s nightmare of a dying colleague blend with Alice’s panic attack: “[T]hat’s not Albie Stark gasping for breath […] Alice [is] sitting up in bed with one hand grasping her throat, horribly like Albie” (240). This idea of a repressed past—personal or shared—coming back to hurt or haunt characters is a recurrent theme in King’s work. In Doctor Sleep, for example, Dan Torrance has learnt to lock the Overlook ghosts up in his mind. In Bag of Bones (1998)—a novel that also turns on the writing of novels—another brutal gang rape and the silence of the community that allows it to go unpunished create a violent haunting.
Billy Summers focuses on an effort to bring the traumatic past to light in a controlled way—one that anticipates and neutralizes the past’s tendency to “haunt” the present. “I remember” becomes a sort of mantra as Billy immerses himself in the details of his war experience: “I remember sporadic gunfire […] I remember hearing a helo off in the distance […] I remember how hot it was […] I remember feeling for the baby shoe” (303). However, it is telling that as this novel ends, it intersects with the world of King’s horror writing—specifically, The Shining and its hotel full of ghosts. The effort to work through repressed trauma consciously may not entirely prevent future hauntings.
The Relationship Between Readers and Writers
King devotes particular attention to the activity of reading (which the novel’s readers are inevitably engaged in as well). One of the first things the novel establishes about Billy is that he is a reader. When presented with the cover story of being a writer, Billy thinks, “He’s a reader, that’s for sure. And he sometimes dreams of writing” (19). As he writes, he begins to do so with Alice—i.e., a reader—in mind. Billy also frequently quotes literature; for instance, he quotes Emily Dickinson with the line “hope is the thing with feathers” (227). Billy’s habit of reading isn’t limited to books; it reflects his observational skills and his engagement with the world around him. When he is given his new wallet, he “read[s] it like a book” (18), and when he meets Hoff, he “reads” the relief in his body language.
One way in which the relationship between reading and writing comes to the fore is in an episode involving an M151, an optical scope used by a sniper’s spotter to calculate precise distances between the muzzle of the gun and its target. In writing his book, Billy is not sure whether to include this level of detail or not. Including the M151 in his first mission as a sniper is a matter of verisimilitude, but communicating its mechanisms to a layperson is challenging. Billy is puzzled: “Does he explain all that or not?” (194).
When mulling over this question he remembers a quotation, but not who said it: “I always keep two people in mind when I sit down to write: myself, and the stranger” (194). The novel’s meditation on the relationship between reader and writer becomes more tangible as Billy starts writing with Alice as his imagined reader. This personalization of the role of the reader—from “the stranger” to a young woman with whom he has a growing bond—resolves the question about the M151 for Billy: She has many questions for him after she finishes reading, but “none are about the spotter scope; they’re about the people” (251). Her emotional response to the first part of his story causes him to reflect that, though it would be strange to thank her for being upset, “he’s glad. He reached her” (250). Although often therapeutic, writing isn’t only about unearthing a personal story; it is also about sharing it and creating bonds of empathy.
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