22 pages • 44 minutes read
Stephen KingStrawberry Spring
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1968A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
The Narrator
An unnamed man, about 30 years old, narrates “Strawberry Spring.” King provides few details about him; he is from Maine, where the story takes place, and for most of the story he is a senior at New Sharon Teachers’ College. He is (presumably) white, middle-class, and heterosexual. He is studious, slightly sarcastic, and lives in a dorm with a roommate. While he refers to both left-wing and right-wing student groups on campus, he does not profess a political affiliation. Like everyone else, he finds the murders disturbing. As an adult, the narrator lives a quiet life with his wife and child.
The only unusual detail about the narrator is his obsession with strawberry spring. He describes himself as “enchanted by that dark and mist-blown strawberry spring and by the shadow of violent death that walked through it” (182). The fog holds a mystical power for him and makes the world seem magical. He likens the atmosphere to The Lord of the Rings, where one might see “a Druid-circle or a sparkling fairy ring” (183). The descriptions transform the campus into a fantasy realm where events do not follow the logic of the everyday world.
The end of the story strongly suggests that the narrator committed the murders in a dissociated state, but the nature of the dissociation is never made clear. King has created a world in “Strawberry Spring” where the real horrors are the powers and motives in life we cannot explain.
Springheel Jack
Springheel Jack is the serial killer who commits the murders of four female students at New Sharon Teachers’ College in March of 1968 and the murder of a fifth woman in March 1976. Like Jack the Ripper, Springheel Jack mutilates and dismembers his victims, all of whom are female, and despite being pursued by a large police force, he is never caught. A New Hampshire journalist “with a passion for the arcane” named the killer Springheel Jack “after the infamous Dr. John Hawkins of Bristol who did five of his wives to death with odd pharmaceutical knickknacks” (187). This reference is fictional, as there is no such murderer.
In reality, “Spring-heeled Jack” is a Victorian legend, a demon-like figure who assaulted Londoners—mostly women and teenage girls—by night and escaped by leaping or flying away. According to The Legend of Spring-heeled Jack by Karl Bell (The Boydell Press, 2012), the legend originated in a London Times article in 1838 (1). Sightings of Spring-heeled Jack increased, and he became a popular character in Victorian culture (2). He was a trickster rather than a murderer, and, unlike the real-life Jack the Ripper, Spring-heeled Jack was a supernatural legend (6-8). The killer in “Strawberry Spring” is a hybrid of the Spring-heeled Jack and Jack the Ripper, blending the genres of horror, fantasy, historical fiction, and true crime.
Springheel Jack’s motives are not clear, nor is it determined whether he is a member of the college community or an outsider. He is assumed to be an adult male, but no one has seen him, and he has left no physical evidence. Like a phantom under cover of fog, he murders without leaving a trace.
The crimes progress in their severity. Gale Cerman’s throat is cut; Ann Bray is decapitated; and both Adelle Parkins and Marsha Curran are dismembered. The message “HA! HA!” is written on Adelle Parkins’s windshield in blood, suggesting that Springheel Jack is taunting the police as Jack the Ripper had done.
Springheel Jack’s murders coincide with the strawberry springs of 1968 and 1976. At the end of the story, we learn that Springheel Jack and the unnamed narrator are likely the same person. It is unclear if the narrator will turn himself in or allow the murders to remain unsolved.
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