58 pages • 1 hour read
Stephen KingRevival
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “Fifth Business. Skull Mountain. Peaceable Lake.”
Content Warning: The source material for this study guide depicts or references self-harm, death by suicide, domestic violence and spousal abuse, drug use and addiction, and child death. Some readers may also be distressed by gory descriptions in the text, as well as offensive language for provincial people.
Jamie Morton begins his narration by describing Charles Jacobs as his “fifth business, [his] change agent, [his] nemesis” (2). Jamie fears that Jacobs’s recurring presence in his life points to the existence of fate and, by implication, an omnipotent force directing it.
The story proper begins in Harlow, Maine, in 1962 when six-year-old Jamie first meets Charles Jacobs while playing with his toy army. The army was a birthday gift from Jamie’s sister, Claire. Jamie cherishes the toy army and is hesitant to share it with anyone, including his best friends. Jacobs introduces himself to Jamie as the town’s new minister. Jamie explains the scenario he has imagined with his toy army, and Jacobs suggests splitting his toy soldiers into a pincer movement to capture the dirt mound Jamie has built. Jamie takes his suggestion and is thrilled by the result. Jacobs goes to meet the rest of the Morton family. He returns to pour water over Jamie’s dirt mound, allowing Jamie to build caves for his soldiers. Jamie takes a liking to Jacobs. While Jamie is distracted, the caves collapse, burying his “bad guy” soldiers.
The following week, Jacobs invites Jamie to his parsonage for a surprise: a model town called Peaceable Lake, which Jacobs plans to move to the church basement for the youth fellowship. Jamie is deeply impressed by the model, especially when Jacobs shows him two “miracles.” He activates the model streetlights using a photoelectric motion sensor and makes a model Jesus Christ walk over the surface of the lake using a battery-operated metal track. Electrical engineering is Jacobs’s main hobby. He explains that he brought Jamie over to show him the model because he misses his wife and his young son.
Several days later, Patsy Jacobs arrives with her son, Morris. Jamie and two of his brothers, Terry and Conrad, help Reverend Jacobs move Peaceable Lake to the church. None of Jamie’s friends are impressed by the minister’s miracles, however.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Three Years. Conrad’s Voice. A Miracle.”
The three years of Jacobs’s tenure as minister are largely pleasant, though a number of bad things happen, including the loss of Conrad’s voice.
Jacobs’s first service is well-attended and well-received. Attendance of the Methodist Youth Fellowship swells, as many young churchgoers, including Jamie, admire Jacobs’s youthful zest. He often incorporates science experiments, like static electricity and Jacob’s Ladder, into his youth talks, stoking the fellowship’s curiosity. On one occasion, Jacobs suggests that electricity is one of the pathways to infinity.
Patsy Jacobs also makes a strong impression on the youth, playing songs by British rock band The Beatles on the piano. Many of the boys develop crushes on her. Morris is also liked by many of the town's children, including Claire. His reputation for following others earns him the nickname “Tag-Along-Morrie.”
During the summer, Conrad and another of Jamie’s brothers, Andy, join their well-to-do family friends, the Fergusons, on a skiing trip at Goat Mountain Resort. While racing down the slope, Conrad is accidentally hit in the throat by his friend’s ski pole. He becomes mute two days later. The doctor suggests that his voice will eventually come back. When it doesn’t, Jamie’s mother, Laura, becomes upset about her husband, Dick’s, inability to pay for Conrad’s medical treatment. Jamie shares his family’s troubles with Patsy and Jacobs, and Jacobs tries to console him by showing him a custom television antenna he invented. Just when Jamie thinks the minister has forgotten about Conrad, Jacobs instructs Jamie to bring his brother over.
Jamie and Claire accompany Conrad to the parsonage. Jacobs presents a new device he has been working on over the past year called the Electrical Nerve Stimulator. The device is based on the ancient Roman doctor Scribonius Largus’s discovery that the currents generated by electric eels could relieve foot and leg pain. Using it on Conrad will allow Jacobs to test the Stimulator’s functional effectiveness. He fastens it around Conrad’s neck and switches it on. Conrad’s voice slowly begins to come back. After two minutes, Conrad manages to speak a full sentence.
When the children return home, Conrad greets their parents hello. Laura is overjoyed while Dick is grateful. They celebrate with ice cream. Afterward, Claire notes an inconsistency in Jacobs’s claim that he has been working on the Electrical Nerve Stimulator for a year. Because Jacobs never spoke of the device until that night, Claire believes he is lying about working on it for a while. She theorizes that Jacobs invented it just that night to help Conrad and Jamie. Later, Jamie realizes that Jacobs didn’t expect his invention to work.
Chapter 3 Summary: “The Accident. My Mother’s Story. The Terrible Sermon. Goodbye.”
In late 1965, Patsy and Morrie Jacobs are driving down the highway when a farmer named George Barton, driving his pickup in the opposite direction, has a seizure and crashes into them. Morrie is instantly killed, while Patsy dies before reaching the hospital. Laura is tasked with informing Jacobs about what has happened to his family. Jacobs is shocked by the news. Laura offers to drive him to Peabody’s Funeral Home for the memorial service. The other townspeople are already there to offer their condolences. Jacobs hurries to see his family before they are ready for viewing and screams at the sight of them. His scream haunts Laura for many years.
Jamie will hear the stories of the accident and the funeral from his mother 12 years later when she is dying of ovarian cancer. The Morton children will discuss giving her enough pills to die, but Andy will disagree on religious grounds. Claire is described as being in love as she enters her thirties and too afraid to kill her mother.
At the time of Patsy and Morrie’s deaths, Jamie is made to stay home with Andy and Terry while the rest of the Mortons attend the funeral. Jacobs enlists a Congregationalist minister and a controversial Shilohist pastor to help deliver the services. He is quiet for most of the burial but gets up with his co-ministers’ help to toss dirt on the coffins. Conrad weeps behind the house during dinner that evening. Claire loses her appetite.
The community life at the Methodist church quiets down. Jacobs doesn’t preach again until the following month. He reads the same Bible passage that was read at his family’s funeral— 1 Corinthians 13:9-12. He then begins the “Terrible Sermon,” indicating that he has spent his time since the funeral in study and reflection. He starts reading from newspaper clippings that report the unexpected deaths of people in various accidents and disasters. These reports bring some comfort to Jacobs, reminding him that he is not alone in his tragedy. However, it also forces him to confront the reasons such tragedies happen. Citing 1 Corinthians again, he supposes that faith is meant to elucidate those reasons. On the other hand, many people have also killed out of religious belief, using their faith and the name of their god to justify their actions. He suggests that religion provides no proof for all its assurances, making it essentially a scam.
Some of the congregation start to walk out of the church while others protest Jacobs, claiming that the tragedy happened because Patsy was drunk while driving. The Terrible Sermon ends with Jacobs proposing that what awaits at the end of life is not God as humanity expects him to be. Jacobs offers the power of lightning as a gateway to understanding what really awaits them all.
The Mortons return home upset. Jamie asks his father, Dick, about the rumor that Patsy was driving drunk. Dick tells him that it doesn’t matter because Barton’s epilepsy made the crash inevitable. While he denounces the rest of the sermon, Dick affirms Jacobs’s statement that some tragedies happen for no reason at all.
Charles is fired as the minister of Harlow. Laura and Dick plan to visit him to thank him for helping Conrad. Claire wants to come, but Laura forbids any of the Morton children from seeing him. The following week, Jamie spontaneously decides to see Jacobs before he goes. He tries to enlist Conrad to accompany him, but Conrad declines.
Jamie finds Jacobs at the parsonage. Jacobs is pleased to see him but says he intends to take the advice Laura gave him: start over and rediscover his faith in someplace new. He assures Jamie that they will see each other again. Jamie thanks him on behalf of Conrad, suggesting that Jacobs could get rich from marketing the Electrical Nerve Stimulator. Jacobs disagrees, admitting that he only built the machine that day with spare parts. He adds that Conrad had likely convinced himself that he would never get back his voice; Jacobs’s device simply tricked him into thinking that his voice would return.
Jacobs decides it is time to leave. To stall, Jamie asks him to confirm that lightning really is as hot as he claimed in his sermon. Jacobs suggests visiting Longmeadow Public Park to find an iron pole called Skytop, where Jamie can see a lightning strike up close. He also tells Jamie that he’s left a gift for him in the parsonage basement. They both say that they love each other, and Jacobs leaves.
Jamie returns to the parsonage during its transition period. Jacobs’s gift is the model Jesus he used on Peaceable Lake. Jamie is about to turn the electric track on when he throws the model Jesus away in a fit of rage. He condemns Jesus. The church closes down when no one comes to replace Jacobs.
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
King opens the novel by establishing the dichotomy between Jamie Morton and Charles Jacobs. Jamie narrates the novel and identifies Jacobs as his nemesis, establishing Jacobs as the antagonist. However, Jacobs’s characterization in the first three chapters complicates this dichotomy. Jamie is sympathetic to Jacobs as a community figure, and Jacobs quickly establishes trust and rapport with Jamie by indulging his childhood games. Their strong first impressions of one another lead to three years of close engagement, where Jamie remains open to everything Jacobs teaches. In particular, the way Jacobs teaches faith through science gives Jamie the impression that the world is dictated by clear systems of order. Just as electricity allows Peaceable Lake to function, a moral system of good and evil ensures that good deeds are rewarded with joy while bad deeds are punished with cruelty. This already points to one of the novel’s major themes: The Dynamics of Science and Faith.
The disparity between Conrad’s miracle and the Jacobs family tragedy upsets this understanding of moral agency and cosmic justice. When Jacobs heals Conrad, Jamie feels a sense of debt toward him. He knows that Jacobs has done something good for him and believes that Jacobs is entitled to a joyful reward. Jacobs later admits, however, that he doesn’t feel responsible for the miracle, believing that Conrad was cured through a placebo effect. This explanation tempers Jamie’s suggestion that Jacobs deserved better from God (though it does not mitigate the toll on his innocent wife and child). Regardless, Jacobs himself clearly believes his situation is unjust: The Terrible Sermon represents not only Jacobs’s loss of faith in God but also his anger. On one hand, he is reacting to the fact that his family suffered so much despite their innocence. On the other, he is reacting to the fact that he continues to suffer despite the role he’s played in the Harlow community.
By critiquing organized religion, Jacobs loses credibility in the eyes of everyone except Jamie, who is reluctant to ostracize Jacobs because of the favor Jacobs did for Jamie and Conrad. Jamie doesn’t lose faith in God until he finds the model Jesus on Peaceable Lake. The act of throwing the model Jesus away points to his reflection on the cruelty of an uncaring God. By rejecting God, Jamie signifies his continued sympathy for Jacobs, mirroring the latter’s loss of faith by acknowledging the unfairness of what happened to Patsy and Morrie.
These chapters also allude to the adult lives of the Morton children, hinting at the novel’s preoccupation with change and the things that persist throughout one’s life. Although Jamie and Jacobs have yet to reinvent themselves, the forward jumps in time hint at one of the novel’s major themes, The Emotional Costs of Starting Life Anew, which is intertwined with a motif of death. Narratively, Laura’s death occurs in tandem with the deaths of Patsy and Morrie Jacobs. This structural choice suggests that Laura experiences a figurative death years before her physical one: She carries the memory of the Jacobses’ deaths with her throughout her life, finding no peace from the memory until she is no longer capable of remembering.
The way the Morton children deal with the impending death of their mother is also significant, developing their characterization. Andy becomes deeply religious and contests the decision to prematurely end Laura’s life. Claire considers the decision but ultimately backs away from it, which points to her continued innocence as an adult. As a narrator, Jamie nevertheless casts the specter of death over his sister by remarking on the “bitter irony” of her finally finding love—the implication being that she did not live to enjoy it. Her death will significantly impact Jamie’s character arc, rendering him vulnerable to what Jacobs’s experimentation promises.
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