King’s Psychological Gothicism
49
his unsuccessfiil ambition and of his incapacity to answer the most haunting
question: “Who and what am I?” or “Who is Mort Rainey?”
Instead of moving forward in order to (re)define himself through the
creation of a new private and active Professional life, Mort tums backward
towards the past: his life with Amy and the proof of authorship of the short story
“Secret Window, Secret Garden.” As Jack Torrance needs to explore the past of
the Overlook Hotel, almost perfectly locked away in “secret” boxes in the
hotel’s cellar, Mort is possessed to reveal John Shooter’s identity and history. In
this process, Mort rediscovers his own history, which first breaks through in the
author’s scary dreams, but then also becomes apparent in his diumal life in the
form of bodily illusions of his double, John Shooter. As soon as Shooter has
gained omnipresence in Mort’s life, Mort’s surrounding transforms into an
uncanny place of utmost unfamiliarity, in which everything known and safe
becomes unknown and frightening. Mort descends into a state of “psychotic
decompensation” (Levin 492), which manifests itself in his DID, producing
Mort’s mood Swings, aggressiveness, derealization, and “unusual perceptual
experiences” (Dobbert 25).
Whereas Jack Torrance in The Shining slowly realizes that his chosen
environment of the Overlook Hotel does not foster but rather hinders his
productivity, stirs his repressed longing for alcohol, and negatively transforms
his family life, Mort lacks any understanding of his emotional or mental state.
He suffers increasingly from self-alienation, night terrors, and repetitious
parasomniac behavior. Mort’s progressing self-alienation indicates his affliction
with profound depersonalization, which Michelle Lambert defines as “an
experience of feeling detached from [oneself]” (Lambert 141) to the degree that
one becomes “an outside observer of one’s mental processes or body” (Lambert
141).
As the analysis of Mort’s dreams and of his daily routine has shown,
the young author faces several out-of-body experiences. These, in combination
with the increase of his “unfocused rage” (King, Window 261), provoke his lurid
parasomniac activities, such as nailing his cat Bump to a trashcan, killing his
two friends Greg Carstairs and Tom Greenleaf with a screwdriver, driving two
and a half hours to bum down Amy’s house, and destroying the bathroom in his
summer house.
Like the narrator of Poe’s “The Black Cat” (1843), Mort is compelled
to kill his cat, since it is a living reminder of his once emotionally rieh married
life. Mort falsely assumes that the cat’s death will enable him to repress and
negate the still existing emotions for his ex-wife, without realizing “that
repression of the softer tendencies will reinforce the aggressive ones, making
them all the more compulsive” (Homey 71). King illustrates the psychological
reinforcement of Mort’s aggressive tendencies further through the brutal murder
of his two friends Tom Greenleaf and Greg Carstairs. Their deaths are
inevitable, as they are about to discover Mort’s mental and emotional instability,
and the real reason for the existence of the bodily illusion of John Shooter—