Travel to the past to prevent a murder, or, the opposite to enforce a murder – and thus accept that the entire world history changes. Everyone had such thoughts before. What would happen, would Hitler have stopped in time? What would our life look like, would Jesus not have died on the cross? In “11/22/63” Stephen King investigates these questions.
Stephen King – the ranking
In “11/22/63” the English teacher Jake Epping travels back to time to prevent John F. Kennedys from being murdered. In German, the novel is called “The attack”, “The Association” would have been better, but it has already been awarded for “The Dead Zone” – both books unites the thought of killing someone for the higher purpose and a better future. Both unites the motif of the man with rifle, who targets a politician from an increased position, a picture that King could never completely banish from his thoughts.
The attempt is also the dream of Democrat Stephen King, who was 16 when his president was shot when driving open with an open limousine, and in his factual texts a line from JFK to Vietnam, racial riots, Nixon and Watergate. The “We Blew it”, which he attested to his generation in the novel “Atlantis”, and which he included, did not start in 1969, but here, 1963. An American shot an American who had a vision.
Oswald, the individual offender
King saves us in “11/22/63” the Oliver-Stone theories that there was a plot for the murder of Kennedy, be it through the US secret service, the Communist, Castro or else. The teacher Epping quickly realizes that the shooter Lee Harvey Oswald is an ideologically confused individual offender. That is also the opinion of the writer: to “98, maybe even 99 percent.”
In any case, it was a monumental undertaking for Stephen King, who worked on this novel with interruptions from 1973 from 1973, which must have an essentially existence compared to a checklist of historical accuracy. This performance cannot be overestimated. This does not just affect beer and car brands from the late 1950s, but also the biographical stations of real existing people such as Oswald or Jackie Kennedy. This novel would also work if he had nothing to do with time travel fantasies, but told a story from the Golden 1950s. “Most of the time I followed the truth,” King writes in the afterword, admitting that he only changed the story of the narrative for the sake of some facts to give his novel, his first attempt at a kind of documentary fiction, a drive.
“The past does not want to be changed – and defends itself”, this mantra meets Epping, which the time travel portal brings back to 1958. From then on, he has five years to find Lee Harvey Oswald. He doesn’t just have to learn what it is like to kill someone. But also not to leave any traces that would expose him as time travelers, so that he himself would be responsible for changed biographies of all those in whose lives. The fact that the man who has traveled in the past for more than 50 years at school where he hires is still the most harmless assumption.
‘You came here from the future’
Epping feels inexplicable hurdles that keep him from his goal, and he falls in love with a colleague from the teacher body and has to decide whether to educate her about his identity. And King succeeds in “11/22/63”, a sentence like “With a weak voice she asked: ‘You came here from the future'” not to make a heroic story sound from the penny novel, but like the beginning of a rather big problem between two lovers.
King uses his story for two essential criticisms. On the one hand, it was important to him to put the assassin as what he might be: a misguided person who believes that he has experienced a revelation, and who in the end, his finger at the withdrawal of the most famous rifle in American history, actually turned into a kind of “monster” that has nothing more human itself. Here the author speaks, who can only explain the incomprehensible with the fantastic.
Changed time lines, a “Beatles reunion”? Why not
Then of course the criticism of the judiciary and the police. The attack, King is convinced, should never have happened. King also blames the city of Dallas, the inability of the officials, the lack of participation of its citizens. For him, Dallas is Derry, the nest that Jake Epping draws, and that plays an inglorious role in “Es” as a place from which good comes from nothing. CIA and FBI also don’t get away well at King. Official chief Edgar J Hoovers role in the de -escalation of the thwarted assassination remains unclear. The agents who hear the unexpected hero Epping do not believe in President JFK. King’s bitter punch line is that Kennedy could have thought it was divine prediction not to have been killed. Yes, being immortal. And yet the dialogues that Epping leads to John F. and Jackie in “11/22/63” are of great sensitivity.
“Rette Kennedy, and everything changes, please,” was the wish that Jake is given before he started his trip. In the end, the realization, both Eppings and Kings that you have to leave the past. No matter what it costs and what chances you miss. Changed time lines, a “Beatles reunion”? Why not. But if a suicide bomber blinds himself up and McCartney blinds? Better not.