Cujo

In these climactic pages, Cujo’s tragic impact hits with full thematic force. Donna and Cujo’s confrontation speaks to the novel’s interrogation of the monster, as Donna herself becomes a monster in viciously killing the rabid dog. The conclusion of Charity and Brett Camber’s arc, meanwhile, speaks to the novel’s negotiations of choice and fate: Just as Charity chooses not to divorce Joe, fate murders her abusive husband and gives her the free reign she has always wanted. Both the Camber and Trenton families’ narrative arcs support the theme of the fall of innocence, as Cujo dies and both the young boys suffer irreparable bodily or emotional harm. Even though Brett survives, he’ll carry mental scars the rest of his life from the summer’s events, which have robbed him of the innocence of his childhood. Nevertheless, the Cambers and the Trentons decide to move forward with hesitant optimism toward the future, revealing Cujo as a novel that embraces the importance of hope in the face of despair.

King devotes ample time to Donna’s final showdown with Cujo because it’s among the novel’s most horrific and intense scenes and has significant dramatic impact. Donna’s choice to confront her fears of powerlessness come to a head in her conflict with Cujo, who forces her to embrace her own power and agency. Together, the two meet the peak of their respective fates, confronting not only each other—their external foes—but their internal struggles as well. In picking up the baseball bat to fight Cujo, Donna rejects her fears of powerlessness and embraces her agency. This moment of combat thus represents her character arc’s full trajectory; whereas she began the novel as a weak, dependent woman, she exits as a brazen, active one and is unafraid to let the monstrous inhabit her to protect her son. The language King uses to describe Donna in her fight to the death with Cujo demonstrates her wielding that power: Beating the dog with the bat, Donna “was the harpies, the Weird Sisters, she was all vengeance” (287). This description references some of the most iconic female monsters of all time. The harpies were monsters of Greek mythology; half woman and half bird, they were known for their vicious nature. The Weird Sisters are from Shakespeare’s iconic Macbeth; they were the witches who prophesized Macbeth’s rise and fall throughout the play (and this description thus also refers to ideas of fate). In making such literary references, King places Donna among a larger history of the monstrous female. To emphasize Donna’s embrace of the monstrous, the narration points out that as she beats the already-dead Cujo, she’s shrieking: “She was still screaming […] she sounded as Cujo himself had near the end” (289). Whereas King implicitly links Donna to the monstrous earlier in the novel, he makes the link explicit here: Cujo has died, but an element of the monster lives on in Donna through her rage and violence.

Despite its brazen violence and dark plot turns, the ending of Cujo is laced with hope. Both traumatized families—the Trentons and Cambers—move on with cautious optimism, encompassing the tenacity of the human spirit that Donna showed (more dramatically) in her face-off against Cujo. Both Vic and Donna carry guilt over the death of their son, Vic because of his absence, and Donna for not acting in time to save Tad. In spite of the previous strain in their relationship due to her infidelity, Vic and Donna decide to stay together to heal from their tragedy and move forward together in their marriage with positivity. Likewise, Charity and Brett, who bears significant emotional scars, face their future with hope. Brett’s childlike innocence before their Connecticut trip has eroded by the novel’s end; he not only grieves the deaths of his dog and father but feels guilt over not intervening in Cujo’s illness and thereby stopping the wave of death at Castle Rock. Charity and Brett decide to stay at their old property despite the events that occurred there. Their adoption of a new dog also represents their embrace of a new future. The novel’s ending thus complicates its theme of negotiating fate and free will. While these characters endure the fate of a bloody summer, their determination and free will grow stronger. The Trentons and Cambers look to the future with hope, precisely to combat the dark events of the summer of 1980, expressing their defiant agency in the face of the universe’s exertions of immovable fate.