59 pages • 1 hour read
Stephen KingThe Man In The Black Suit
Fiction | 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.
Symbols & Motifs
The Bee
In “The Man in the Black Suit,” the bee symbolizes fate, or random events that humans cannot control.
A bee sting is usually an event without serious consequences. Only in rare cases, like Dan’s, when a person has a bee sting allergy are there serious consequences. At the beginning of the story, Gary mentions that there is no doctor in Motton (46). This fact sets up a series of conditions that make Dan’s death seem like fate, rather than an accident.
According to the History of Allergy, French physiologist Charles Richet discovered anaphylaxis in 1913, a discovery for which he received a Nobel Prize (Munich 2014, 54). Theoretically then, in 1914, doctors around the world could have known about the condition and its treatment. Gary writes that there is a doctor in the neighboring town of Casco, but it is debatable whether a small-town doctor in rural Maine would be able to treat the condition. Dan was stung while he was out in the field, so even if there had been a doctor nearby, Dan may have died before he was able to get there.
No amount of reasoning can change the inevitability of Dan’s death, and the bee is a chilling reminder of how little control humans have over their own lives.
The Brook Trout
The brook trout that Gary uses to propitiate the Devil is a complex symbol at the heart of the story’s horror aesthetic. The Devil’s chant “Big fish! […] Oh, biiig fiiish!” is unsettling because it contains fetishistic overtones (58). The Devil has already fetishized Gary’s wet trousers, sniffing them and exclaiming, “Oh, bad! […] Lovely-bad!” (54). The “lovely-badness” of the Devil’s urges make him a more complex devil than one who is purely a source of evil. This Devil relishes in taboos, things others consider shameful.
His lust for the trout and the way he swallows it whole, greedily and grotesquely, perverts the traditional Christian association of the fish with Jesus Christ. One of Jesus’s miracles in the Bible is using five loaves of bread and two fish to feed a gathering of 5,000. In this case, the fish represent giving rather than greed. In Matthew 4:19, Jesus tells two fishermen who become his disciples that he will make them fishers of men, meaning that they will help Jesus spread the word of God.
When Gary catches the brook trout, he notes that it was the biggest trout he had ever caught (50). Later, Gary reflects that if he had been satisfied with catching it, he would not have had his encounter with the Devil. Instead, he stays, wanting to catch even bigger fish. Thus, instead of symbolizing sharing or ministry, the trout symbolizes greed, a hunger that can never be satisfied.
The Fork in the Stream
The crossroads, or in this case, the fork in the stream, symbolizes a difficult decision or choice. In folklore, the Devil appears at the crossroads, meaning that one choice leads to good while the other leads to temptation.
In “The Man in the Black Suit,” the Devil does not offer Gary a choice, but Gary still had a choice to make; he could have gone home after catching the large brook trout. This is not to say that Gary made a mistake by staying at the stream. After all, he had no reason to suspect that anything dangerous would occur.
Gary’s Creel
Gary’s creel symbolizes his meeting with the Devil. Aside from its ordinary purpose of holding fish, the creel becomes the object that proves—or suggests—that Gary’s encounter with the Devil was real. When Gary’s father inspects the creel after returning to the scene of the chase, he notes that it is empty. Gary insists that the creel contained another fish, and the father replies that something must have eaten it.
The reader has two options to consider: either the Devil ate the fish before disappearing, or an animal ate the fish while the basket was unattended. Gary caught the fish before he dozed off, so it is unlikely that catching the second fish was part of his dream.
The father’s strange reaction after finding the creel suggests that the creel came in contact with the Devil. When Albion throws the creel over the bridge, he gives Gary the excuse that it smells bad. Gary notes the strange defensiveness of his tone but does not mention it (67). The creel is also symbolic of the meeting because Albion tells Gary to invent an excuse if his mother asks about the creel. Because Loretta never mentions it, they never tell her about the meeting, and according to Gary, they never speak of the experience again.
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