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.
Themes
The Emotional Costs of Starting Life Anew
The title of King’s novel refers not only to Charles Jacobs’s evangelical approach and to the goal of his final experiment but also to the patterns of reinvention that both Jacobs and Jamie Morton undergo throughout their lives. Jamie and Jacobs “revive” themselves by moving away from the tragedies that defined their pasts. The novel’s long timeframe, however, gives King narrative space to ask whether one can truly escape the past and successfully begin again.
The first time Jamie meets Jacobs as an adult, the former minister has restyled himself as Dan Jacobs, a purveyor of lightning portraits and inventor of other electrical devices. Jacobs seems to have moved on from the tragedy of losing his wife and child; his decision to help Jamie through his heroin addiction signals the emotional progress he’s made since the day of the Terrible Sermon. Still devastated by the untimely loss of his only sister, Claire, Jamie starts working for Jacobs partly because he looks up to him as an example of someone who has moved on from his grief so fully. As they spend more time together, however, Jamie realizes this is not actually the case. Jacobs holds on to mementos of Patsy and Morrie, admitting that he thinks about what might have happened to their souls every single day. When Jamie starts to realize that Jacobs’s electrical treatments and portraits have unintended aftereffects (themselves a symbol of the past’s lingering presence), it becomes clear that Jacobs is acting out of angry desperation and using and hurting people along the way. Jacobs’s callousness regarding Cathy Morton’s aftereffects marks a particular turning point in Jamie’s relationship with Jacobs because he understands that Jacobs doesn’t care about those he “heals.” Jacobs thus becomes a cautionary tale about illusory recovery.
Meanwhile, Jamie’s ongoing enmeshment with Jacobs illustrates the difficulty of his own attempts to move on with his life: Jacobs tries to preserve Jamie’s perception of him by helping him reinvent himself at Wolfjaw. While Jamie takes to his new life as a studio foreman very well, he is once again forced to cross paths with Jacobs when his employer, Hugh Yates, invites him to attend one of “C. Danny” Jacobs’s revival tour shows. This latest reinvention on Jacobs’s part takes the form of outright deception—he lies about the tragedy of losing his family to exploit his congregation’s suffering—while still reflecting Jacobs’s underlying obsession with his family’s fate. Despite recognizing this, Jamie finds it difficult to move on with his new life because Jacobs was such an important figure in his childhood.
Tellingly, the only real consolation Jamie can find is in the past: He returns to Harlow to be with his brothers and to find closure for the loss of Claire and the Terrible Sermon, all of which suggests that reinvention alone cannot heal the hurts of the past. However, Jamie’s efforts to confront his past do not stop Jacobs from leveraging that very past against him: Jamie is compelled to agree to help Jacobs because he can’t live with the idea that he failed to help Astrid when he had the chance. Despite the years that have gone by, Jamie still cares for Astrid in ways that mirror Jacobs’s continued love for Patsy and Morrie. With this final plot development, King suggests that it is impossible to move on fully from one’s past. No matter how well one reinvents themselves, the past will always compel them to return to their roots.
The Dynamics of Science and Faith
The Terrible Sermon is a scathing invective against organized religion. Though this might suggest that the novel simply critiques religious belief, the character of Jacobs and his impact on others hint at a more complex depiction of faith.
The novel lays the groundwork for this exploration via Jacobs’s unique relationship to both science and religion. Jacobs begins the novel as a firm believer in the Christian god. However, rather than see science as a field that contradicts his religious beliefs, he uses science to amplify his teachings, inviting children like Jamie to view the natural world and the spiritual world as two sides of the same coin. When Jacobs loses his family to a meaningless accident, the integrity of science and faith as the pillars of his worldview is suddenly upset. Jacobs loses his faith in organized religion’s ability to make sense of life, and the Terrible Sermon is his attempt to awaken his congregation to the senselessness of tragedy and the way organized religion exploits suffering to advance its leaders’ agendas. When he reemerges as a revival pastor, Jacobs appears to embody his own insight, using electrical miracle cures to fund his experiments.
One might think that Jacobs has become a cynical atheist, but in truth he has replaced his love for the Christian god with a devotion to secret electricity: He still believes in some faith-based tenets like the soul and the afterlife, but he no longer accepts that the Christian perspective will allow him to prove their existence. Instead, he comes to believe that electricity can show him what has become of his family. King thus hints that science is in its own way a form of faith. Some scientists, like Jacobs, will devote most of their lives to proving one particular belief, even if that belief is the falsehood of religion.
Jamie’s arc presents another perspective on the theme. Jamie loses faith in God because he cannot reconcile the Jacobs family tragedy with his minister’s fundamental goodness. As he gets older, however, he starts to recognize the corruption of Jacobs’s character, which is tied to his religious devotion to secret electricity and causes him to view everyone around him as a means to an end. During his last experiment, he reveals to Jamie that he only ever wanted to keep him in his life in order to open the door to the world beyond life. Nevertheless, when Jamie’s brother, Terry, tells him that he agrees with the Terrible Sermon in the context of Claire’s death, it resonates with the part of Jamie that has agreed with Jacobs all along. Though he disagrees with Jacobs’s actions, Jamie understands his “faith,” underpinned as it is by a desperate need to make sense of tragedy.
The novel therefore argues that faith, whether scientific or religious, stems from one’s relationship to their experiences: One can choose to be either hopeful or cynical about the nature of the world. As the novel ends, Jamie finds himself in a state of ambiguous, tenuous hope. He believes there is a chance to escape the aftereffects of Jacob’s treatment, but he is unsure what the point of hope is when he knows that Mother is waiting for him in the world beyond life.
The Dangers of Curiosity
Revival functions as a cautionary tale about those who transgress “natural” boundaries to seek greater knowledge. As mirror characters, Jamie and Jacobs share the same essential character flaw—curiosity. This curiosity drives Jamie to engage with Jacobs during each of their encounters while encouraging Jacobs to push his experiments further and further.
In fact, Jamie and Jacob’s relationship has its origins in curiosity. During their first meeting, Jacobs indulges Jamie’s imagination by helping him to think of new scenarios for his toy soldiers. This engages Jamie’s interest in whatever Jacobs teaches him, including his lessons on faith and science. After Jacobs leaves Harlow, his influence on Jamie persists: Jamie is compelled to bring Astrid to Skytop because of Jacobs’s suggestion that he find it.
As an adult, Jamie’s curiosity pushes him to seek Jacobs out. He agrees to go with Hugh Yates to Jacobs’s revival show when Hugh expresses his own curiosity to learn what Jacobs has made of himself. He then employs Brianna to help him in tracking the outcomes of those who have been cured at Jacobs’s shows. Once he learns about the aftereffects that these people have experienced, Jamie is compelled to seek Jacobs out. While his stated purpose is to stop Jacobs from healing any more people, he also seems resolved to find out Jacobs’s motivations for administering electrical cures. This will help him to understand his own relationship with the former minister, helping him to learn whether Jacobs really loves him as a person or whether he views him as the means to an end.
While Jacobs’s exploitation of his congregants and Jamie’s inability to disentangle himself from the minister hint at the damage curiosity can do, it is Jacobs’s final experiment that reveals curiosity’s true cost. More than the obligation to help Jacobs in exchange for curing Astrid, curiosity is what pushes Jamie to stay with Jacobs through this experiment. Just as much as Jacobs wants to unlock the door to the world beyond life, Jamie wants to prove that Jacobs’s devotion to secret electricity is meaningless. They both discover something more than they bargained for. Jacobs learns the painful truth that his family suffers at the mercy of the Great Ones in the Null, while Jamie learns that Mother waits for him at the end of life. Both characters also pay the price for their curiosity: Jacobs dies during the experiment, while Jamie is fated to live the rest of his life in the certainty that nothing but torment awaits him after death. With this bleak ending, King suggests that nothing good can come from absolute knowledge. In this case, faith and ignorance are bliss.
Related Titles
By Stephen King
