59 pages • 1 hour read
Stephen KingThe Man In The Black Suit
Stephen KingFiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1994A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Character Analysis
Gary
Gary is the story’s protagonist. When the story begins, he is 90 years old and lives in a nursing home in Castle Rock, Maine. Gary was a teacher until he was 65, and for 20 years he wrote a column called “Long Ago and Far Away” for the Castle Rock newspaper Call (45).
When the story opens, he is losing his short-term memory—he forgets his great granddaughter’s name, for example—but he remembers every detail of his meeting with the man in the black suit.
As a child, Gary is helpful and obedient. He completes the chores his father assigns to him before going fishing. He keeps his promise to his parents not to go beyond the fork in the stream, addressing them as “sir” and “ma’am,” respectively (47-48).
At the stream, Gary shows himself to be quick-witted and calm under pressure. When the bee lands on his nose, he does not swat it away wildly but stays still and carefully blows at it using his lower lip. When the strange man approaches him, Gary immediately realizes he is not human and guesses that the man is the Devil after smelling sulfur. When the Devil claims he wants to eat Gary, Gary offers him the fish. When the Devil chases Gary up the hill, Gary throws his fishing rod at him, and the Devil stumbles over it, allowing Gary to escape.
Despite Gary’s shrewdness, he is still a child and has a child’s fears. He believes the Devil’s story about his mother dying from a bee sting. He wets his pants when the Devil appears. He runs to his father and frantically tells him about the Devil and about Loretta’s supposed death. He hugs his mother tightly when he discovers that she is alive.
Gary had nightmares about Dan until the winter after Dan passed away, but when “The Man in the Black Suit” begins, Gary is no longer having these nightmares (63). In Gary’s nightmares, he saw his brother’s purple, swollen, disfigured face staring out at him from the shed.
Gary does not seem to blame himself or anyone else for his brother’s death, but the Devil tells Gary that it was Loretta’s fault for passing the bee sting allergy on to Dan (56). If the Devil is a manifestation of the dark, subconscious thoughts that Gary will not allow himself to admit (one possible interpretation for the Devil in this story), Gary may blame his mother for Dan’s death.
When young Gary’s story concludes and the narrative returns to the present, 90-year-old Gary says he tries to convince himself he has no reason to fear the Devil (68). However, something is troubling Gary’s conscience. King leaves the reader to speculate about why Gary may still fear the Devil and what secrets, if any, may be weighing on Gary’s conscience.
Albion
Albion is Gary’s father. He is the archetypal patriarch, meaning that he embodies all the qualities associated with a strong father figure. Albion is a protector; he protects Loretta from seeing her deceased son’s face, and he protects Gary when he returns to the stream where Gary encountered the Devil. Albion is practical. When Gary meets him in the road, Albion is returning from a meeting with a farmer from whom he had hoped to buy cows. When Albion hears Gary’s story, he does not jump to conclusions but calmly assures Gary that his mother is safe and suggests they retrieve his rod and creel. Albion is important because he functions as the voice of reason to counteract the Devil’s lies.
Loretta
Loretta is Gary’s mother. She is 35 years old. King does not describe her appearance except for the curl of hair that catches the light on her forehead and the housedress with red roses that she wears (47).
On the day Gary meets the Devil, Loretta is baking bread in the kitchen. She represents the matriarch archetype. The matriarch is a maternal figure who is nurturing and takes care of the home. Like the patriarch, the matriarch is a leader. After Gary promises Albion that he will not go beyond the fork in the stream, Albion makes Gary promise Loretta as well. Loretta waits for Gary to correct his grammar from “Promise not to go no further” to “Promise not to go any further” before he leaves to go fishing (48). This action shows that Loretta is perhaps an even greater authority figure than Albion.
Loretta is in denial about Dan’s death; she refuses to accept that he died from a bee sting. She does not have another explanation for Dan’s death, and King does not allow readers any further insight into Loretta’s thoughts.
The Man in the Black Suit (i.e., the Devil)
The man in the black suit is the antagonist. He walks out of the forest and meets Gary while he is fishing by the stream. Gary describes the man as having a long, pale face, slicked-down black hair, and orange flames for eyes. He has long, white fingers that end in talons instead of nails, and the grass dies as his shadow passes over it. Gary believes the man to be the Devil when he smells sulfurous fumes emanate from the man’s suit.
The Devil is by turns childish and threatening. He mocks Gary for wetting his pants and rolls on the ground laughing at his dirty rhyme. The Devil paints a gruesome picture of Gary’s mother gasping for breath as her face swells and her throat closes. After the Devil convinces Gary that his mother has died, the Devil tells Gary that he will gut him like a fish and eat him. He provides lurid details about why Gary will prefer to be dead after his mother has died, telling Gary that Albion will rape him (58).
The Devil seems to take pleasure in torturing Gary, but his ultimate motive is not clear. Nor is it clear why the trout captivates the Devil, who repeats “Biiig fiiish!” as he snatches it from Gary and ingests it (59). The Devil’s greediness for the fish is childish and impulsive, just like his other behaviors.
The Devil conforms to Jung’s devil archetype. The archetypal devil is a trickster, greedy, immoral, dishonest, and destructive. In Jungian psychology, the devil represents the dark side of human nature that we attempt to repress.
Gary’s family is devoutly Methodist, which is a denomination of Protestant Christianity. Gary says that he knows from his “church schooling that the devil is the father of lies” (57). Unlike in Jungian psychology, where the devil is the dark side of an individual’s subconscious, the Christian devil is the personification of evil that exists in opposition to God, who is the ultimate source of good. The Christian devil tempts individuals to reject God and follow their dark, evil, or worldly impulses. Hawthorne’s story “Young Goodman Brown” presents the devil in this way, as someone who can offer Brown power for a price.
The difference between the devil in King’s story and the traditional Christian devil is that King’s devil does not offer Gary power or wealth. He does not offer Gary the opportunity to prevent or reverse his mother’s death by exchanging something of value. He does not force Gary to renounce his religious beliefs. Instead, King’s devil seems content to torment Gary and then threatens to eat him, which is more similar to a threat from a boogeyman under a child’s bed. This reflects a more Jungian approach to the character since the man often threatens Gary with things that a young boy might find scary or worrisome, particularly one who has recently lost his brother to a tragic death from a common event.
It is arguable whether the man in the black suit was real or a dream. He may have been the Devil or someone—or something—else. His encounter with Gary may have been a dream while Gary was asleep on the bank. Gary may have fantasized the encounter, or the Devil could have truly walked out of the woods to taunt and frighten the boy. The ambiguity of the man in the black suit is one of the elements that makes “The Man in the Black Suit” a compelling horror story.
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