The Stand

“It seemed as if that man was describing everything I dedicated my life to, its hopelessness, its damned nobility. He said that things fall apart. He said the center doesn’t hold.” 

Starkey is referring to a Yeats poem that describes entropy. Civilizations are bound to rise and fall. What Starkey doesn’t realize is that the dark man rises precisely when things get unstable. As the old order passes away, he hopes to set up a new one with himself in charge. 

“He was a clot looking for a place to happen, a splinter of bone hunting a soft organ to puncture, a lonely lunatic cell looking for a mate—they would set up housekeeping and raise themselves a cozy little malignant tumor.” 

Flagg is just waking up to himself in the present moment and is describing his elemental nature. In every time and place where he has incarnated himself, his role is always the same. He finds a situation to exploit and creates destruction. 

“Love is what moves the world, I’ve always thought … it is the only thing which allows men and women to stand in a world where gravity always seems to want to pull them down.” 

As Mrs. Baker lies on her deathbed, she makes this observation to Nick. Although she’s referring to her relationship with her late husband, the comment has a broader meaning. The only reason that Larry, Glen, and Ralph have the courage to confront Flagg is their love for Abagail, one another, and their fledgling community. 

“It didn’t occur to her to wonder why ‘authority’ seemed to be such a necessary thing to have, any more than it occurred to her to wonder why she had automatically felt responsible for Harold. It just was. Structure was a necessary thing.” 

Frannie has just begun her journey, so she doesn’t quite grasp the implications of her own statement. The world has lost all structure. Old authorities are gone. While there may be a necessity to create a new structure, what form that new structure will take is a crucial decision. It represents a choice between good and evil, heaven and hell.

“Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home.” 

Glen makes this wry comment as he contemplates the shape of post-plague society. Like Starkey’s comment about entropy, or Mrs. Baker’s comment about gravity, something is always at work undermining the material world. Randall Flagg is the living embodiment of that something. 

“No one can tell what goes on in between the person you were and the person you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no maps of the change. You just … come out the other side. Or you don’t.” 

Larry is contemplating a recovered drug addict and applies the experience to his own life. When he makes this comment, he’s only at the beginning of his journey of transformation. His self-doubts won’t vanish completely until the day he stands up to Flagg and comes out on the other side. 

“Because He’s a hard God, a jealous God, He Is, what He Is, and in this world He’s apt to repay service with pain while those who do evil ride over the roads in Cadillac cars. Even the joy of serving Him is a bitter joy.” 

Abagail is describing her love-hate relationship with God. In the cosmology of the novel, God requires sacrifice from those who serve him. Abagail, Glen, Ralph, and Larry must all sacrifice their lives to defeat Flagg. 

“There is a certain mentality that believes in covering up. They believe in it with the sincerity and fanaticism that members of some religious groups believe in the divinity of Jesus. Because, for some people, the necessity to continue covering up even after the damage is done is all-important.” 

Glen is offering another telling observation about the corruption of government. Any attempt to cover up military secrets in the post-plague world is the ultimate absurdity. There is no need to save face. No one will remain to feel scandalized. 

“Men who find themselves late are never sure. They are all the things the civics books tell us the good citizens should be […] They make the best leaders in a democracy because they are unlikely to fall in love with power.” 

Judge Farris makes this comment about Larry. Throughout the book, Larry reproaches himself for his shortcomings. At this stage of the story, he has emerged as a leader but still doubts his right or his ability to steer a course for others. 

“Organization and government come first. If it starts now, we can form the sort of government we want. If we wait until the population triples, we are going to have grave problems.” 

Because Glen is a sociology professor, he is keenly aware of the vacuum left by the destruction of a central government apparatus. He sees the post-plague world as a marvelous opportunity to create the kind of government that will serve all its citizens equally. For him, Boulder offers a unique chance to make an ideal a reality. 

“To give away pride and hate is to say you will change for the good of the world. To embrace them, to vent them, is more noble; that is to say that the world must change for the good of you.” 

Harold writes this manifesto to explain the choices he makes in life. At various points in the story, he arrives at a crossroads when he might choose a different path. Instead, he nurses his grievances against an unfair world. His pride always wins out over the possibility of forgiveness. 

“She is a sort of God-by-proxy. You can measure the strength of any society’s faith by seeing how much that faith weakens when its empiric object is removed.” 

Glen acts as the voice of social commentary throughout the book. He has always feared the rise of a theocracy in Boulder because of Abagail’s presence. After she leaves to wander in the mountains, he speculates whether the social structure they’ve created can function without her. 

“I no longer think that sociology or psychology or any other ology will put an end to him. I think only white magic will do that … and our white magician is out there someplace, wandering and alone.” 

Glen has always put his faith in the external trappings of civilization to keep barbarism at bay. However, like many others in Boulder, he has come to realize that Flagg is something more than an ambitious warlord. He is a demon in human form that a similar benevolent power must vanquish.

“None of us want to really see a Star in the East or a pillar of fire by night. We want peace and rationality and routine. If we have to see God in the black face of an old woman, it’s bound to remind us that there’s a devil for every god—and our devil may be closer than we like to think.” 

The judge is making a comparison between the spiritual and material realms. Like Glen, he’s uncomfortable at the thought of a theocracy in Boulder. However, everyone will eventually have to do battle with the supernatural if they hope to enjoy material comforts in the post-plague world. 

“They talk like people, he thought, who have kept the huddled-up secrets of their guilts and inadequacies to themselves for a long time, only to discover that these things, when verbalized, were only life-sized after all.” 

Glen is observing people at the town meeting when they all publicly share their dreams of the dark man. Flagg has been able to terrorize the citizenry in their nightmares. He functions best in silence and darkness. When people give voice to his antics, the antics lose their power to paralyze. 

“He had fallen victim to his own protracted adolescence, it was as simple as that. He had been poisoned by his own lethal visions.” 

Harold belatedly realizes the damage he has done to himself by refusing to forget his childhood humiliations. If he hadn’t carried his grudges with him into the post-plague world, Flagg would never have been able to recruit him to his faction. Harold blindly followed the dark man who promised him revenge, only to betray and destroy him. 

“Everything you made here is falling apart, and why not? The effective half-life of evil is always relatively short.” 

Nadine is deliberately goading Flagg to get him to kill her. However, her words ring true regarding the nature of evil. It is cyclic and cannot sustain itself. Flagg repeatedly tries to solidify his position as the ruler of the world. His efforts never attain lasting success, and he finds himself reborn in another time and place to make another short-lived bid for power.

“That was what was missing back there in Las Vegas, he decided—simple love. They were nice enough people and all, but there wasn’t much love in them. Because they were too busy being afraid. Love didn’t grow very well in a place where there was only fear, just as plants didn’t grow very well in a place where it was always dark.” 

Tom is simple-minded, but he understands the true distinction between Las Vegas and Boulder. The citizens of the Free Zone are bound to one another by ties of love. The people of Las Vegas don’t rally around anything but fear of an uncertain future and an even greater fear of the dark man himself. 

“The casting away of things is symbolic, you know. Talismanic. When you cast away things, you’re also casting away the self-related others that are symbolically related to those things. You start a cleaning-out process. You begin to empty the vessel.” 

Glen is explaining the significance of the journey by foot to Las Vegas. The four men who undertake it are shaking off the dross of their former selves. In purifying themselves on this journey, they are also becoming acceptable sacrifices to Abagail’s jealous God. 

“The hand of God came down out of the sky. And maybe God had left this battered ’70 Plymouth here for them, like manna in the desert. It was a crazy idea, but no more crazy than the idea of a hundred-year-old black woman leading a bunch of refugees into the promised land.”

Stu makes this comment after he finds a vehicle that he can drive in his injured state. After the explosion in Las Vegas, one seeming miracle after another comes to his rescue. It is as if the sacrifice made by Glen, Ralph, and Larry has restored the cosmic balance, and goodness can function again to assist those in need. 

“He never dies. He’s in the wolves, laws, yes. The crows. The rattlesnake. The shadow of the owl at midnight and the scorpion at high noon. He roosts upside down with the bats. He’s blind like them.”

Simple Tom is once more offering a deep truth about the nature of the dark man. Flagg cannot completely die because he represents a cosmic principle. He is the darkness that occasionally overshadows the light. Humanity cannot afford to become complacent in his temporary absence.

“I think they were the sacrifice. God always asks for a sacrifice. His hands are bloody with it. Why? I can’t say. I’m not a very smart man. P’raps we brought it on ourselves.” 

Stu is telling Frannie about the explosion in Las Vegas and that their friends are dead. Abagail’s biblical God requires blood sacrifice to balance the scales. Stu implies that the deaths were an act of atonement for the human invention of the plague virus. 

“Dear children, the toys are death—they’re flashburns and radiation sickness and black, choking plague. These toys are dangerous; the devil in men’s brains guided the hands of God when they were made.” 

Stu is contemplating what he will tell his children about weapons of mass destruction. The novel suggests that this critical lesson not to play with dangerous toys will go unlearned. The continued existence of Flagg seems to confirm the idea that the devils in men’s brains will eventually beckon him back to the world.