Some thoughts on the first three chapters of IT, for the IT Bookclub! These first three chapters did such an excellent job of setting up everything. @bit-club already said as much in their notes, but it is really amazing how the themes, characters, and setting are laid out with such detail and foreshadowing in these early chapters.
I love this chapter. When I first read IT a few years ago, I was instantly hooked by this first chapter. I don’t think I’m wrong in saying the scene with the storm drain is iconic.
These lines stood out to me, primarily for their personification of the flood:
“Stenciled across each of the horses was DERRY DEPT. OF PUBLIC WORKS. Beyond them, the rain had spilled out of the gutters clogged with branches and rocks and big sticky piles of autumn leaves. The water had first pried fingerholds in the paving and then snatched whole greedy handfuls—all of this by the third day of the rains. By noon of the fourth day, big chunks of the street’s surface were boating through the intersection of Jackson and Witcham like miniature white-water rafts. By that time, many people in Derry had begun to make nervous jokes about arks.” (p.4)
If memory serves, this is the start of a motif. This town is being eaten away. Literally, in that It is feeding on its citizens, and figuratively in the way the town devours people who aren’t the white hetero Christian majority. The town is rotten, falling apart at the seams despite people’s efforts to ignore and slap bandages over the mess.
Spoilers, but this is one detail of many in this chapter that wraps around to the end of the book. It begins and ends with a storm, only in the end, they really will need that ark for the storm that will cleanse Derry.
After the Festival (1984)
A very brutal chapter, but necessary in showing the reader different perspectives on Derry and what it’s like. bit-club makes excellent points about the contrasting perspectives Derry’s residents have on the city, and people’s different ways of handling these perspectives. It is so common, so present and inescapable that people have learned to just accept It and willfully ignore what happens, if they don’t reject and try to leave the way Don Hagarty does.
Stan’s chapter always makes me sad. That’s the point — it’s a tragedy, that this happy, loving, successful man is so terrified of the great evil he faced in childhood (the thing that he cannot comprehend, and therefore cannot accept and cope with as an adult) that he kills himself. I always wonder what Patty, his parents, and friends made of it. They had no idea what he went through, no idea why he would commit suicide.
I never realized before, but the first thing Richie does is lie. He puts on a Voice to talk to Mike. This is a man for whom hiding, putting on a persona, is second nature. There is so much distance between the face (voice) Richie presents and the real him.
“Because you made a promise when you were eleven? Kids don’t make serious promises when they’re eleven, for Christ’s sake!” (p.68)
I love this line. There’s this dismissal/disbelief around the things children believe and promise, but as King goes to show, kids’ promises can be some of the most true and powerful oaths there are. Children don’t worry about the logic or obligations of adulthood interfering. Also, it’s another thing that sets the Losers apart. The Losers are different. They’re adults, but they still hold to this promise they made to each other over two decades ago.
I love Ben’s section, even if I don’t have anything particularly analytical to say about it. I love the look at his life we get through Ricky Lee’s eyes. It’s just chilling, how afraid Ben is and how he tells Ricky Lee he might be better off killing himself than going back to Derry. It continues to press how terrible and terrifying this horror they’re going home to is.
Every time I read Bev and Bill’s sections, The Stranger by Billy Joel starts playing in my head. Bev fighting back and escaping Tom such a cathartic scene, but I love how Tom and Audra — two very different people, two very different spouses — recoil from the stranger their wife/husband become once the memories begin to return.
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