Stephen King’s The Eyes of the Dragon: Re-reading Our Favourites
By Angela Roberts
March 21, 2011
Stephen King’s The Eyes of the Dragon is still what I remember as being the very first grown-up novel I ever read. I was in grade five, and my teacher came to me one day, handed me this thick hardcover book and urged me to read it. I’d been reading picture books, devouring my Dad’s old comic books, and read books and books of non-fiction already by this point, but I’d yet to really sit down with a chapter book more complex than a choose-your-own-adventure or a Goosebumps book. While it’s fair to classify the novel as YA, back then to a bright eleven-year-old, it was the thickest and most grown-up book one might imagine. I read it cover to cover, and from then on embarked on my continued love affair with big thick genre novels. It’s also the only Stephen King novel I ever actually read. I tried out a few, but never really got into his slow prose style enough to finish anything. And eventually, I fell in love with the works of authors like Michael Crichton, Terry Goodkind, and Robert Jordan, and forgot about any youthful ambitions of reading more King. But I still remembered The Eyes of the Dragon fondly, and re-reading it for this article, I realized how much the novel influences my own writing.
The novel, which came out in 1987, was a departure for King, it being his first overtly classical fantasy novel. He wrote it for his daughter, who didn’t like his horror books, and there is a sense of the storytelling King running through the novel, as if he is writing down the story as he’s telling it to his child at bedtime. It’s not terribly surprising that my own main genre is fantasy when one considers this as my first novel, although my earliest writings were most heavily influenced by Goodkind and Jordan. But there are other elements of this novel that I can see running through my own work, and that can be taken as valuable influences in one’s writing.
Firstly, there is the matter of perspective. The story has an overt third-person omniscient perspective, but there is also a subtle blending of third-person subjective. The narrator (the unnamed storyteller) is a heavy presence; he comments, he backtracks, he emphasizes and downplays. He is, in a way, a commentary on the storytelling process itself. But, as I said, there is a subtle blending of perspectives with third person subjective. This is because we get to see into the inner thoughts and perspectives of the characters. We see the story’s events through their eyes; the storyteller delves pretty deeply into several characters. This method of storytelling is pretty common in genre fiction these days, but it wasn’t as prevalent back in the eighties. At least, I can’t think of it being so, certainly not in epic fantasy. Now I suppose nearly everyone does it, and it’s become hardly remarkable. But it is still worth looking at King’s way of manipulating this narrative mode so that the switching is nearly invisible.
Perhaps even more notable is the way in which King crafts his characters, and how he treats good and evil. It’s a lot more balanced than one usually expects from classical fantasy. Yes, Flagg is evil. He is the embodiment of evil, in this novel as well as several others of King’s works; he is first noted in King’s works as the devil character in The Stand, and has apparently played a role in King’s Dark Tower series. But rather than say Flagg is evil, and be done with it, King’s storyteller spends quite a bit of time in Flagg’s head, showing us his thought processes and reasoning, no matter how esoteric he is. Flagg is also rather frightening, but rather human too; he gets colds, he doesn’t pay attention when he should, and he gets jealous and obsessive. And the more human characters in the novel are given real frailties and virtues, whether good or bad. The storyteller goes to great lengths to convince us that Thomas is not really evil, just misunderstood. For a novel geared towards children, there is a great deal of psychological study devoted to all of the characters, especially Thomas. But it’s not just the villains that are made round characters, but the protagonists as well. Peter seems perfect, but he has his own weaknesses lurking behind that perfection, not all out in the open, but there. His father is an imperfect man, neglectful of one son, too trusting, distracted, an angry drunk. Hardly a great and noble King of fairy tales.
So, this isn’t the type of characterization that you might find in Tolkien. And King is hardly the first or last writer to do this. But he is the first novel writer that I read who did it. And that influenced me in ways I never realized, notably in the way I write my own characters.
Re-reading The Eyes of the Dragon, I began to see things in the novel that had stuck in my sub-conscious and influenced my own writer’s voice. This is normal. Everything we read influences the development of our voice. But it was still interesting to look back and see how the novel stands up to the passage of time. Every bright fifth-grader ought to read it, ought to allow it to expand their imagination. Those who don’t are missing out.