The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

Sean Wykoski

2/21/14

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

   The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon was an interesting read as it was definitely a different novel by Stephen King and addressed certain hidden meanings that we can connect to our topic of Free Will and Determinism. The novel starts off with a little girl, Trisha McFarland, who has gone on a hiking trip with her brother and mother. While the two of them argue, Trisha goes off the path to relieve herself and to spite her mother and brother. However, she ends up getting lost and having to survive in the woods for a few days. Lost with only a days worth of food and clothing, she slowly looses her sanity and feels as though all hope is lost. She is finally rescued and while she is recovering she tells her father how she was like her hero Tom Gordon.

  The biggest connect I could see to Free Will and Determinism in this book would be her belief that she is in the mercy of the forest, and that after a while she learns that she must face her fear and create her own fate. Us humans are constantly at the will of mother nature, but we can choose to either allow it to control us or we can fight back and live our own lives. We do so by creating homes, wearing clothes, and driving cars. These three protect us from the elements and it is what Trisha did while she was lost; she didn't make a car however. When it was raining and she was tired and sick, she knew she had to do something, so she took a stick and broke it in order to make a tent out of her rain poncho. This kept her dry from the rain allowing her to warm up and keep the sickness at bay.

  Trisha talked about the God of the Lost in her book and describe this creature in the woods as some kind of spirit like thing that was following her. This could be seen as King's depiction of a god as it was a supernatural being in the eyes of Trisha. Trisha claimed that she was at the will of the God of the Lost and that it determined what would happen to her. However, at the end of the novel she came face to face with a large bear which she believed was the God of the Lost in disguise. She had two options, either give up and let the bear kill her or she could fight back and make her own fate. She thought of what Tom Gordon would do and summoned his courage and strength. She throws her walkman at the bear and strikes it on the face. After this she is rescued by a hunter and while it was just coincidence that the hunter found her, Trisha was in belief that she had earned her rescue by defeating the God of the Lost. She knew that she had fought back against the woods trying to determine her fate and she had created her own destiny.