Rebirth of a Salesman: Alfie Zimmer’s Salvation through Literary Criticism in Stephen King’s Short Story “All That You Love Will Be Carried Away”

            Alfie Zimmer lives in the ersatz world of American travel landscaped by identical chain motel rooms, open roads, snack machines and public bathrooms in various states of disgrace. He leads the lonely life of a salesman and no matter where he goes he inevitably ends up in the exact same Motel 6 room off I-80. Practically before he sees it King tells us “He knew the room; it was the room of his dreams.” He’s being literal there. No one aspires to be in a Motel 6. King continues “Alfie knew it all. He had dreamed it right down to the green rug, but that was no accomplishment, it was an easy dream.” Alfie is desperately lonely and disconnected from other human beings. Other characters are referenced in the piece but he never speaks directly to them. He calls his wife, but she never picks up. He thinks about offering a sales pitch to the farmer’s wife but he never crosses the field to the house. He plans to end his life, here in room 190 of the Motel 6, the room he sees in his mind when he sleeps. Yet, even as Alfie tastes the barrel of the gun he intends to die by, something pulls him back.

            What pulls him from the brink, if only momentarily, is a tattered notebook with bathroom verse written inside of it, such gems as “Save Russian Jews, collect valuable prizes,” and “I suckt Jim Morrison’s cock with my poutie boy mouth.” Not exactly Shakespeare (although he does find the bard, in a line from Hamlet’s infamous soliloquy in a men’s room on I-70 “To be or not to be, that is the question.”) He sees these almost like hieroglyphs, the coded messages and art of other travelers which he anthologizes and dissects linguistically and critically. He looks for deliberate constructions, counts iambs and measures couplets in doing so “He came to gradually see—or perhaps only to hope—that something was going on here.” It’s crucial here to note that the debate over if the poems have meaning is irrelevant, what matters is Alfie thinks he has found a connection to humanity through primitive literature.
         My favorite piece of bathroom verse, posted to social media site in a pixelated cell phone image from my friend, reads “Roses are tits, Violets are tits, I love tits, Tits,” I’m pretty sure there not meaning bubbling below the surface except perhaps that the allegedly male writer enjoys tits. Alfie himself refrains from adding notes to his finds on possible meanings, finding “Explanation rendered the exotic mundane.” On the other hand the fact that I can so easily recall a line of verse posted months ago lends credence to the claim the poems themselves could have meaning. Indeed the line “Save Russian Jews, win valuable prizes” makes its debut as graffiti in Derry, Maine in Stephen King’s horror novel It published in 1986. “All That You Love will Be Carried Away” appeared in the New Yorker in 2001. Stephen King has carried that line for nearly two decades.  Perhaps we as human beings are drawn to make meaning out of all other human effort in order to feel connected.  “Yet little by little he had become fascinated with these messages from the interstate where the other communications seemed to be dipped headlights when you passed in the rain, or maybe somebody in a bad mood flipping you the bird when you went by in the passing lane..”

            This poems move Alfie so much that he considers going back to school: “He had thought on many occasions that he could go back to school, take some courses, get all that feet-and-metre stuff down pat. Know what he was talking about instead of running on a tightrope of intuition.” But not even a page later after doing some critical thinking on a couple of lines for the readers’ benefit and talking about the book he would write, he concludes “Even to try seemed almost arrogant. He was just a little man, after all, with a little man’s job. He sold things.” Yet he still cannot kill himself until he finds the right place for the notebook. He worries someone will find it and think him insane…but he doesn’t want to destroy it “Because he loved the stuff in the notebook. Amassing graffiti—thinking about graffiti—had been his real work these past two years.” It’s a terrible bind--he truly believes in the importance of his compilation but fears the rejection of the work by others. He ends up standing in a farmer’s field prepared to throw the book away and kill himself unless he gets a sign of life from another human being or from the universe--a small symbol of interconnectedness. If the lights turn on inside the farm house in sixty seconds he will abort his suicide and write his book. Acting nonchalant about his choices he casually weighs his options in the next two paragraphs, the one about the book is lyrical and writerly, hopeful:

            To write a book like that, he thought, you’d have to begin by talking about how it was to measure distance in green mile markers, and the very width of the land, and how the wind sounded when you got out of your car at one of those rest areas in Oklahoma or North Dakota. How it sounded almost like words. You’d have to tell about the silence, and how the bathrooms always smelled of piss and great hallow farts of departed travelers, and how in that silence the voices on the walls began to speak. The voices of those who had written and then moved on. The telling would hurt, but if the wind dropped and the spark lights of the farm came back, he’d write the book.

VS:

If they didn’t, he’d throw the notebook into the field, go back into room 190 (just hang left at the Snax machine), and shoot himself, after all.

Either way, either way.

            The contrasting length and detail alone is enough to tell us this is not a man who truly wants to die but rather the birth of a critical thinker, a literary critic. We know it’s not the birth of a poet, Zimmer tries once in the piece to write a poem himself “Here I sit about to COOL-it, my plan to eat a fuckin’ BOOL-it.” While many short stories are dedicated to the birth of artists, few, if any, show the rise of the critic. Zimmer is complier and historian to the graffiti on one hand, on the other he is everyman of our cold, distant culture. He seeks, like so many of us, to glean meaning from art.

The “Teacher Question” I know is coming “What type of Literary Critic is Alfie Zimmer?”

Zimmer is not a New Critic as he compares the poems to each other and includes the location and surrounding of their findings in his analysis. He could be a feminist critic because he notes in several places where “My mother made me a whore” is written it is followed up with “If I supply the yarn, will she make me one?” and notices a lack of sympathy. More likely he is deconstructionist because he splits up the work into iambs and sounds and trying to make a greater meaning. The more subtle implications of the verse are not lost on him. He could also be a reader response critic because he talks about opening his book with where he found each piece and the sub culture of bathrooms in which they exist.