53 pages • 1-hour read
Christine
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Symbols & Motifs
Christine
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of bullying, gender discrimination, cursing, illness, and death.
A Plymouth Fury, Christine represents a furious force. Once Arnie buys Christine, his key relationships become contentious. He fights with his parents for the first time, and tension develops between him and Dennis to the extent that Dennis notes, “[I]t was almost as if this car didn’t like me, as if it suspected me of wanting to come between it and Arnie” (343-44). Arnie fixates on Christine, and Christine obsesses over Arnie.
The car doesn’t want to share Arnie with anyone, so it strives to end his positive relationships. Isolated, he becomes susceptible to LeBay’s nefarious spirit, which the car fosters and carries. Before physically killing Arnie, the car and LeBay’s spirit wreck him. He develops a bad back and ages rapidly: “His face looked haggard and stunned. There were dark circles under his eyes” (465). Arnie embodies the destruction that Christine symbolizes, and Christine threatens to corrupt Arnie by making him a permanent vessel for LeBay’s toxic spirit.
Christine’s destructiveness doesn’t always directly harm Arnie or his interests. When Christine kills Buddy and his friends, the car is a protector. Because Arnie is unable to defend himself, Christine takes over and punishes his bullies. In other moments, Christine represents a positive influence. Initially, Christine cures Arnie of acne (likely because of aging him), and the car’s presence gives him the confidence to romantically pursue Leigh. Ultimately, however, the positive symbolism soon collapses. Arnie develops far more severe physical issues than acne, and though Christine facilitates his romantic relationship with Leigh, the car tries to kill her. Leigh quips, “I thought girls were supposed to be jealous of other girls. Not cars” (424). This line illuminates Christine’s central trait: The car is “jealous,” murdering anyone that distracts Arnie from it.
Darnell’s Garage
The garage symbolizes home to Christine, domesticating the car and thus enhancing the anthropomorphism surrounding it, in which others often talk about the car as if it were a woman. After Buddy and his friends vandalize Christine in the airport parking lot, Arnie moves the car to the garage. Now that Christine has a stable residence, the car focuses on its work: to repair itself and to destroy Arnie’s antagonists and those trying to help him.
After killing Moochie, the car returns to the garage as if it were a person coming home from work or an errand: “She rolled inside and whispered across the oil-stained concrete to stall twenty” (526). The calm imagery repeats after Christine kills Darnell: “Forty-five minutes later, she sat in the darkness of the late Will Darnell’s Do-It-Yourself Garage, in stall twenty” (812). Once again, the picture replicates a person quietly and contently coming home from a job or commitment. Christine lives in the garage, and her specific address is stall 20. While the police reduce Christine to a cube of scraps, they don’t demolish Darnell’s garage. Since Christine’s home still exists, it’s possible that the car repaired itself, killed Sandy in Los Angeles, and remains a threat to Dennis.
Dreams
The motif of dreams highlights The Toxic Effects of Obsession and Antisocial Behavior. The characters’ nightmares have an obsessive quality, since they inevitably center on Christine and her harm. The novel doesn’t describe the characters having uplifting or bad dreams about something other than Christine. Her destructiveness defines their dreams.
The nightmares start in Chapter 7 (“Bad Dreams”), when Dennis dreams that Christine attacks him. In Chapter 18, he dreams that Arnie and LeBay’s putrid corpse are in Christine together. Later, Arnie dreams that Christine kills multiple people, and Leigh dreams that Christine stealthily waits outside while she and Arnie have sex. The many disturbing dreams reinforce Christine and LeBay’s toxicity. Their presence is hateful and violent, and they make Arnie equally misanthropic. Together with Arnie, Christine and LeBay’s spirit projects enough infatuation and malevolence to occupy the other characters’ realities and dream worlds.
The nightmares and hallucinations foreshadow and deepen the characters’ surreal experiences. However, Stephen King doesn’t discard the boundaries between dreams and reality; instead, he keeps them separate to show how reality becomes a nightmare. Concerning the disturbing ride home with Arnie on New Year’s Eve, Dennis notes, “There is no way to separate what was real and what my mind might have manufactured; no dividing line between objective and subjective, between the truth and horrified hallucination” (901). Dennis isn’t dreaming. He sees Arnie briefly turn into LeBay and struggles to articulate his experience.
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