“The Dark Half” (post 2) by Stephen King (post 10): Unknown narrator, using oddly indented parenthesis, implies “George Stark” had actually been buried

Chapter 3 takes place in the cemetery where People magazine had set up an imitation grave site to take a picture for their article on the “death” of the protagonist’s literary pseudonym. The inscription on the imitation headstone had been: GEORGE STARK, 1975-1988, Not a Very Nice Guy.

The cemetery’s gravedigger finds a hole at that site, where no grave had ever been dug and nobody had ever been buried. Even more puzzling, it looks like someone has dug his way out of that hole, and there are large footprints leading away from it; moreover, the gravedigger is told that a murder has been reported less than a mile away.

Still puzzling to me, this chapter again contains one of the author’s oddly indented parentheses, previously seen in Carrie (see Carrie posts):

“The fragments of footprints petered out less than twelve feet from the

    (grave)

    hole in the ground” (1, p. 51).

It appears that what the regular narrator refers to as a “hole,” some other narrator is calling a “grave,” implying that George Stark (the discontinued pseudonym) had actually been buried there.

In short, the pseudonymous alternate personality has gotten a literary incarnation, death, burial, and resurrection. And I’m still not sure who is communicating to the reader via the oddly indented parenthesis.

1. Stephen King. The Dark Half [1989]. New York, Gallery Books, 2018.