The Outsider

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2018

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

Part 8

Part 9

Part 10

Part 11

Part 12

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Part 7Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 7: “Visits”

Part 7, Chapters 1-5 Summary

July 25

Detective Jack Hoskins wakes in the night and goes to the bathroom. The burn on the back of his neck where the shadow touched him is red and blistered. Sitting on the toilet, he sees a shape behind the shower curtain. A hand creeps around the edge of the curtain, and he sees the word “CANT” tattooed on the backs of the fingers. The shadow speaks directly into Jack’s mind, telling him that the burn is cancer and that if he wants it gone, he has to do what the shadow tells him. Skin cancer is Jack’s greatest fear. He will do anything the intruder wants to get rid of it. He passes out and wakes in his bed in the morning.

Jeannie Anderson wakes in the pre-dawn hours. Returning from a trip to the bathroom, she hears a low voice tell her to freeze and stay silent. She sees the shadow of a man in her living room. He tells her to tell Ralph to drop the investigation or the intruder will kill everyone involved and leave them in the desert for the buzzards to eat. It’s a strange reference, as there are no deserts in Oklahoma. He shows her his fist in the faint light. The letters tattooed on his knuckles read, “MUST.”

Jeannie passes out and wakes in her own bed in the morning. She tells Ralph about the intruder and his message—that Ralph has to stop investigating. Ralph looks for physical signs of the intruder but finds nothing. He asks Jeannie if the intruder might have been the burned man from the courthouse. Jeannie says that she saw him clearly enough to describe his face—a heavy brow, dark hair, and a goatee. The description rings a bell for Ralph, but he can’t quite place the connection. Jeannie asks him again to stop investigating, but she sees he is disappointed in her for asking. He explains that his mistakes contributed to Terry’s death, and if Terry was innocent, then there is a vicious child-killer still on the loose.

Part 7, Chapters 6-12 Summary

Ralph remembers that Claude Bolton, the bouncer from the strip club, had something tattooed across the backs of his knuckles. He also vaguely remembers the burned man at the courthouse having tattoos on his knuckles, but Claude couldn’t have been the burned man. Claude’s boss at the strip bar insists that Claude had been on duty the day Frankie Peterson was killed. Bolton has been on vacation in Marysville, Texas, for a couple of days now. He couldn’t have been in the Anderson living room talking to Jeannie.

Ralph arranges for a state trooper in Texas to drop in on Claude at his mother’s home. The trooper confirms that Claude has the tattoos on his knuckles: CANT and MUST. Lovey Bolton, Claude’s mother, says Claude was cooking breakfast for her in Marysville a few hours after Jeannie saw him in Oklahoma.

Part 7 Analysis

Jeannie’s request that Ralph stop investigating shows a lack of confidence in him. To Ralph, it suggests that she thinks he isn’t capable of protecting his family. She is also asking him to abandon his sense of honor and duty and has therefore failed to see his deepest and most fundamental self.

Jeannie’s temporary surrender to fear may strike readers as out of character. Until now, she has been very much of one mind with Ralph. Although Jeannie has suggested to Ralph that he doesn’t have to solve the puzzle, she has always supported his need to do so. King seems to be using Jeannie to test Ralph’s resolve and force him to confront what he is willing to risk in his pursuit of truth, honor and justice.

With the reference to buzzards, the outsider gives away a clue. The image is so alien to Oklahoma that it fixes Ralph’s (and consequently the reader’s) attention. Practically speaking, the reference will confirm the characters’ later suspicion that the outsider is in Marysville, Texas. It also illustrates the thought transfer between the outsider and Claude Bolton, the bouncer from the strip club.

By connecting Claude with the burned man, Ralph is back on familiar ground, finding the kind of clues he is used to and comfortable with. He can’t yet see how it will all fit together, but he can see that a real-world explanation might still reveal itself.

This is our first meeting with Claude’s mother and effectively our first introduction to Claude—although we have read his eyewitness testimony regarding Terry’s appearance at the strip club. King is particularly prone to introduce new characters in the middle of a story, which can result in a story that feels unbalanced.

Samuels’s reappearance gives us a glimpse into his growth. He still has his childish cowlick, and he hasn’t matured enough to fully admit his fallibility, but the fact that he is able to take a scolding from his ex-wife without resentment and acknowledge the justice of her criticism speaks to a level of intellectual honesty. For both Ralph and Samuels, wives play the role of moral compass, and for both men, their confidence and reliance on their wives shows confidence and strength of character.