55 pages • 1 hour read
Stephen KingMr. Mercedes
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Happy Slapper
Now that Hodges is no longer an active detective, he chooses not to carry either his old service weapon or his father’s old Victory .38. He selects instead a more basic weapon—the “Happy Slapper,” a sock weighted with ball bearings—closer to a defensive weapon, requiring the user to come within easy reach of the target. For Hodges, the Happy Slapper represents his relinquishment of his formal identity as a police officer and acceptance of his new role as a private citizen.
The Happy Slapper, with its load of ball bearings, is a parallel to Brady Hartsfield’s flak jacket, also loaded with ball bearings intended to act as shrapnel when he sets off his bomb at the concert. While Brady’s flak jacket is a weapon of mass destruction, Hodges’s Happy Slapper is a targeted weapon designed to produce the minimum necessary force on a very precise target, which is how Hodges uses it to drive off the bullies who are hassling the boy beneath the underpass.
When Holly takes the Happy Slapper from Hodges, she is symbolically making the leap from child to adult while Hodges is the mentor stepping back and turning the fight over to the younger generation.
The Gray Mercedes
Olivia Trelawney used to call her Mercedes the “Gray Lady,” and in the novel, the car represents redemption and unfinished business. Instead of having the car demolished after the accident, Olivia had it restored. In her mind, the car was innocent; she blamed herself (unjustly) for the killings.
When the Mercedes reappears like a gray ghost near the climax of the story, it represents Hodges’s unfinished business and his opportunity to close the last case he left unfinished. Finally, the car carries Holly, Hodges, and Jerome to their final confrontation with Brady, redeeming and avenging itself on the man who used it to commit an unpardonable crime. In the end, Holly adopts the car and has it painted blue, a color that she says represents forgetting.
Hodges’s Father’s Gun
Hodges’s father’s gun, the Victory .38 Smith & Wesson, represents for him the identity that was wrapped up entirely in his job. Without a job, he doesn’t know who he is or what to do with himself. Retirement feels like death, and at the beginning of the novel, he is placing the gun in his mouth to see what dying by suicide would feel like. The gun represents his only family connection: He lost his marriage and has no meaningful relationship with his daughter. Without them, he has no relationships on which to build an identity, except that of his father via the .38.
In the first few months after Hodges’s retirement, he keeps the gun by him at all times, but when the contact from the Mercedes killer gives him a new lease on life, he locks up the weapon. Death no longer looms over him: He has his identity back.
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