59 pages • 1 hour read
Stephen KingA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
When we first meet Bill Samuels, Ralph describes him as youthful—a “child prodigy.” The cowlick at the back of his head makes people think of Alfalfa from the Little Rascals. That childish feature symbolizes his immaturity. His repeated smoothing of the cowlick suggests self-consciousness underlying his superficial confidence. That insecurity leads him to compensate by acting precipitously in Terry’s arrest and sticking doggedly to his guns for fear of losing face.
In the end, Samuels learns his limitations. Moving forward he will take a more mature and less reckless attitude. When Ralph meets with him after Terry’s exoneration, Samuels has gotten his hair cut, and the cowlick is gone, signifying that he has grown up.
Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson” is a story about a man (Wilson) haunted by his doppelgänger, who gradually takes over Wilson’s life. In desperation, Wilson finally attacks the doppelgänger, only to find that he has fatally wounded himself. The story has no conclusive ending in that the reader never learns whether the double was real, supernatural, or a delusion (or some combination).
In The Outsider, the characters’ interpretations of this story evolve based on the information they have about Terry and his apparent doppelgänger. Ralph first interprets the conclusion of “William Wilson” to mean that the doppelgänger never existed—just as he resists believing that Terry could have been in Cap City. Jeannie, however, points out that the second William Wilson appears to have been real, much like Terry’s alibi appears to be real. Her explanation is that Terry has an accomplice who looks like him. When they can no longer deny that Terry apparently was in two places at once, Jeannie suggests that the end of the Poe story is intended to be inexplicable. Similarly, Terry’s apparently being in two places at once is inexplicable, and Ralph might as well leave it at that. There is too much at stake for Ralph to simply let the question go, however. He continues to investigate, confident that the material explanation will eventually present itself.
As in Poe’s story, this explanation proves elusive; the nature of the outsider remains obscure. We are all left with the unknown and no choice but to accept it.
The two stories that Terry and Samuels recall in the wake of Terry’s murder—that of the footprints and of the cantaloupe—symbolize the different ways that the two men look at Terry’s case. Samuels followed Terry’s “footprints” as far as they went, but when the videotape from Cap City appeared, the trail disappeared into thin air. The disappearance is inexplicable, so he doesn’t try to explain it. He knows what happened up to the point where the tracks disappear, so he ignores what he can’t explain and believes what he already knows.
In Ralph’s mind, he has the evidence in his hands but can’t make sense of it any more than he could understand how the worms got into the cantaloupe. Unlike Samuels’s disappearing footprints, Ralph’s cantaloupe is shocking and very concrete. It represents a disappointment and the spoiling of something he loved. To Ralph, the worms represent Terry’s and Ollie’s deaths and all the contradictory and inexplicable evidence. Something he loved—his job—has been tainted, and he won’t be able to resume it until he has solved the mystery and restored a sense of order to his world.
By Stephen King