Under The Dome by Stephen King is a must-read for your cruise around the world. It will keep your mind alert, your muscles exercised, and your intellectual standing elevated.
However, tackling “Under the Dome” to review it for you required a game plan, a simple one to unravel the intricacies of this novel. And what could be simpler than presenting the review in two parts, based on the polarities of good and evil, for the first part, and using the plot, for the second part. This then allows us to start from the beginning with the first part, the characters.
The main icon of goodness is a kind of hippie abandon. Happily, as clean as a boy scout, he has the unlikely nickname of the nightmare of the feminist movement, Barbie. Please don’t let the immense irony of this escape you: a self-respecting ex-military man runs around calling himself Barbie, a source of irritation to the local no-good. You see, he’s relatively new to town, getting a job at the local diner, earning the scorn of the resident addict after introducing himself as Barbie. This leaves us covered in depth, you know what, Kafka’s mother’s “scheudenfreud” craft throwing off menacing auras.
With this Kafka-esque massage, you’re sure to be a dinner party star for at least a year. You can wallow during the appetizer and the main course in the middle of oceans of psychological waters, to probe, to navigate, to fish, with subterranean currents that twist and defeat, like a Tsunami. Your dining companions will marvel at your depth of knowledge, analytical prowess, and far-reaching erudition. Actually, Barbie should be the last nickname in the world that his personality would accept, advertise, respond to. Any self-respecting hunk of male testosterone would have made it clear to humanity at large that that’s not going to happen. But get used to it, dear reader, and surely as the story unfolds, the sublime irony will reveal its true meaning.
Now let’s take a look at the omega character, protagonist really, in the form of evil, Jim Rennie, a Christian on his knees, a dishonest used car salesman, who despises his son most of the time, covets money, the power and revenge. and pray a lot. This symbol of evil is presented almost in the first sentence, as eager to flog our symbol of good, Barbie. Aside from these interesting personality flaws, Rennie is a sexual bag of tricks, having to make do with his continual and not-so-pleasant fantasies.
And so the plot thickens and thickens and continues to thicken like a newlywed’s first attempt at white sauce. After firmly pinning the characters center stage, the minor ones emerge, and then the minor ones, all very Pop Eye and Olive. With the characters established, the author uses the culinary art approach to set the stage for the ensuing struggle between good and evil, as the story unfolds within a unique physical setting.
This physical setting evolves like a small New England town, a bucolic rural landscape, but not just with its pretty bales of hay. Rather, it is reminiscent of a Shakespearean play within a play or a ballet rugby scrum. What happens is this: out of nowhere, he floats over Carters Mill, an invisible dome that isolates everyone in the city from the rest of Maine, the US and suffers the consequences, always very bloody.
Now we’re ready to move on, watching good and evil as the combatants clash. In one corner, the evil one trying to achieve her goals of revenge, power, money and in the other corner, the good one, Barbie trying to save the town and herself. This book is wildly entertaining, even convincing at times, with a kind of diarrhea of the imagination, a puppet show, with the entire little town of Carter’s Mill in Maine, population 3,000, becoming the cacophony, the curtain in the background, the canvas for the difficult. It’s all in a day’s work and a lot of fun, watching the characters, the symbol of evil seemingly about to triumph over the symbol of good. For more, the critique of the story, you can see the June post on American Made Yes.
