75 pages • 2 hours read
Stephen KingThe Eyes of the Dragon
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1984A 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
How Evil Fails
Evil in The Eyes of the Dragon is represented by Flagg and Flagg alone. The rest of the characters operate in shades of gray. Flagg’s evil is close to all-powerful. He is like Sauron in The Lord of the Rings; he is ancient, sees all, and patiently bides his time as he brings tragedy to Delain. In the glimpses the reader gets of Flagg’s magical abilities, it seems unlikely that any mortal character can defeat him, and there is nothing really stopping Flagg from destroying Delain or worse. There is no force of good that measures up to his power and no moment when his manipulation of individuals doesn’t work as it is intended. The heroes of the novel defeat Flagg only due to a series of fortunate events and small kindnesses that defy the odds.
Even those fortunate events and kindnesses could not possibly defeat Flagg on their own. The novel suggests that Flagg ends up failing in the end because evil, by its nature, undoes itself eventually. This is a larger theme in King’s oeuvre; the evil entities rarely predict that their own instincts for mischief will end up hurting them too. Flagg, following his instinct, shows Thomas the secret passage where Thomas eventually witnesses Roland’s murder. Flagg is not in the castle during a critical week because he is off fighting a rebellion he intentionally started. As Peter explains during the final showdown, evil tends to repeat the same tricks, forgetting what it has done before and unwittingly revealing itself (362). Evil, by its nature, self-sabotages.
King uses the same phrase to describe evil repeatedly throughout the novel: evil is “sometimes strangely blind” (161, 243, 326). Whether due to overconfidence or some supernatural intervention of the universe, all-knowing evil stops paying attention to what will eventually lead to its undoing. Flagg does not care to think about Sasha’s lessons to Peter, napkins, or the dollhouse because he has more important matters of state to care about. At the same time, his magic sense for the goings on in Delain suddenly stops at exactly the moment Peter, Dennis, Ben, and Naomi gather at the castle to aid the escape. His ability to spy on people and predict their actions fails him “at times of great import” (243). While evil does plenty of damage, the narrator makes it seem that, eventually, evil will inevitably fail.
Dogs Versus Gods
Goodness in the novel is defined by Sasha early on as a sort of thesis for the rest of the story—she calls it godliness, but in the context of the novel she means it as the opposite of evil. Sasha explains to Peter that gods and dogs are “the two natures of man” (15). Men who are like dogs only do as they are told and never stand up for what is right. They do not cultivate their own moral compass or form habits of goodness. “Most bad people are more like dogs than devils” (16) but end up serving devils like Flagg. Dogs, in this view, are what enable evil to flourish.
The context of Sasha’s lesson is five-year-old Peter’s use of napkins. Thus, she frames goodness as something like manners. Goodness is something that must be practiced daily. You cannot be good by only doing a single good act (like, say, Thomas at the end of the novel); someone is good if they habitually do good. At the same time, Sasha’s thesis seems to suggest that only the nobility can truly be good because only nobles have the freedom to follow their own moral compass. Others can do only what their “masters” or employers demand. If a commoner has a strong moral compass, likely they will suffer the knowledge that their “masters” are evil without being able to act upon it. Dennis’s struggle to atone for his role as an unquestioning follower (a “dog”) illustrates the moral bind that commoners are stuck within.
There are many dogs in the novel, actual and figurative. Frisky, for example, is as heroic a character as any human, but Frisky’s goodness is more about obedience than morality. The same is true of the various butlers in the novel (Brandon, Arlen, and Dennis)—though both Dennis and Arlen disregard orders to do what they think is right, making them good. The same is true of Roland and Thomas; both behave as obedient dogs for their “master,” Flagg. Though Roland is known as “Roland the Good,” Sasha would never consider her husband anything but a dog. Roland has an addiction to alcohol and willfully ignores Flagg’s governance in his name. Roland might in his heart know what is right or wrong, but he lacks the fortitude to do something about it. This is what Thomas becomes, too, and the narrator emphasizes this by revealing that Flagg loves Thomas like a pet dog and by calling Thomas “not a good boy” and maybe “a bad boy” in a repeated refrain.
Seeing and Watching
Throughout The Eyes of the Dragon, many characters watch other characters without them knowing. The narrator also draws the reader’s attention to moments when they fail to see each other. In the latter case, evil becomes “strangely blind” to the benefit of good, and Flagg can make himself “dim,” or difficult to notice. Sight also becomes warped, such as when Thomas looks through the eyes of the dragon and everything becomes colored greenish-gold, giving him a headache and the sense that the world is on fire. The dragon eyes color his perception in both literal and figurative ways. Flagg controls the flow of knowledge related to Roland’s murder by putting on an act. The prevalence of altered and magical sight in the novel suggests that King is playing with ideas of perception, knowing, and even storytelling through the metaphor of looking.
There is also magical sight. Something gives Peter, Ben, Naomi, and Flagg dreams that reveal to them the actions of other characters in the future. Peter, Ben, and Naomi see Flagg looking into his crystal. Flagg watches Thomas kill a dog in his crystal and eventually sees Peter’s escape attempt. Flagg “sees” anyone who might even think his name, reminiscent of Sauron’s all-seeing eye. These magical forms of surveillance present a sense of interconnectedness in a world without communication technologies. It both serves as a narrative device for King to keep characters involved when they are not around while controlling what characters know what, and it serves to heighten the paranoia as characters try to keep secrets from each other.
Central to the story is Thomas’s spying on Roland through the eyes of the dragon. The narrator explains the joy and addictive qualities of spying, comparing Thomas spying on his father to readers reading the book. The narrator suggests watching characters who don’t know they are being watched makes “even the most trivial actions seem important” (88), a commentary on the difficulties of storytelling—knowing what parts to describe and what parts to skip over. Finally, Thomas sees Flagg murder Roland, and seeing is knowing. The knowledge of the murder is what haunts Thomas throughout the novel. It is unwanted knowledge, but one cannot undo seeing. Everything in the story hinges on what is seen or not seen—or how it is seen and when.
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