Author(s)

Lijuan Wang ¹

Affiliation(s)

¹ School of Foreign Languages, Tianjin University, Tianjin, China

Corresponding Author

Lijuan Wang

ABSTRACT

"Strawberry Spring" is a famous short story by Stephen King tinged with the color of Gothic horror. It tells the story of a serial killing committed by Springheel Jack which happened on foggy nights in strawberry spring. There is no direct description of the way the narrator looks or dresses but some clues can be obtained through deliberate reasoning. This article focuses on the deduction of the killer based upon textual analysis of the story in which the descriptions of the environment, dialogues, actions, and psychological states related to the narrator will be paid close attention to. It constitutes the most intriguing point of this novel that the murderer masked by fog had never been disclosed by the narrator and readers try to track down the criminal as a detective. Through a close reading, an unexpected conclusion can be drawn that the narrator himself is the serial killer.

KEYWORDS

Springheel Jack, Serial Killer, Description, Clues

CITE THIS PAPER

Lijuan Wang, Identification of Springheel Jack in  "Strawberry Spring". Lecture Notes on Language and Literature (2023) Vol. 6: 46-50. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.23977/langl.2023.060408.

REFERENCES

[1] Stephen K. (1978). Night Shift. In Strawberry Spring (Ed.), Strawberry Spring (1968). Stephen, K. (pp. 54-56), New York: Doubleday. 
[2] Hu Z. L. (2013). Linguistics: A Course Book. Beijing: Peking University Press, 173-176. 
[3] Zhou D. M. (2004). Popular Literature in the Context of American Culture Viewed from Stephen King’s Award. Proceedings of the National Symposium on Chinese and Foreign Modern Culture, 287-293. 

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