59 pages • 1 hour read
Stephen KingThe Outsider
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3: “The Arraignment”
Part 3, Chapters 1-4 Summary
July 16
On the morning of the arraignment, a crowd has gathered outside the front steps of the courthouse, screaming for Terry’s blood. Samuels is watching from just inside. He looks stunned, but Ralph wonders if he planned this as a publicity stunt. One man gets past the police line and spits in Terry’s face. Ralph trips him. Terry stops and helps the man up. Ralph thinks it’s like something from the New Testament.
Ralph notices details in the crowd—a man with features distorted by old, long-healed burn scars wearing a yellow kerchief on his head, a man carrying an old newspaper sack and wearing a knit cap despite the hot weather, and a girl sitting on her boyfriend’s shoulders, her yellow bra strap showing. His attention returns to the man with the cap, and he recognizes Ollie Peterson, who is drawing a gun from his bag. Ollie shoots Terry twice before Ralph can take him down.
Terry is fatally wounded with only seconds left to live. Ralph begs him to admit to the murder and clear his conscience. With his last breath, Terry declares his innocence and asks Ralph how he will clear his own conscience. Samuels has finally stepped out of the courthouse. Marcy turns and screams at him that her husband was innocent and that this is Samuels’s fault. Samuels turns without a word and goes back inside.
Part 3 Analysis
The scene before the courthouse has explicitly biblical overtones. The incident with Terry helping the man who spat on him foreshadows Terry’s death and confirms that an innocent man is dying for someone else’s sin. In this case, the sin is not only that of the outsider; it is also Samuels’s vanity and Ralph’s violation of his own principles by arresting Terry too quickly.
After the shooting, Ralph begs Terry to admit to having committed the crime. If Terry is guilty, then Ralph’s mistakes will be at least partially justified. However, in a reversal of the Christ story, the sacrificial death does not redeem Ralph’s sin. Terry maintains his innocence and places the onus for Ralph’s errors back on his shoulders. Ralph hasn’t yet earned redemption.
Maintaining the biblical symbolism, Samuels, as Pontius Pilate, delivers Terry into the hands of the mob and then symbolically washes his hands by turning and retreating into the courthouse. This might make Samuels seem indifferent, but his frozen astonishment as he watches the riot unfold is more likely an example of his inexperience; he didn’t predict the violence of the public response to Terry’s arrest.
Terry’s death upends the story. To this point, it had seemed to be a story about two good men facing off with the outsider as the obstacle between them. With Terry’s death, the conflict shifts. Now Ralph is facing off against the outsider with his own rigid materialism as the obstacle he must overcome.
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