33 pages • 1-hour read
Premium Harmony
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Symbols & Motifs
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, animal death, addiction, and substance use.
Biznezz
Biznezz begins the story as a symbol of the marital impasse, a function that is made explicit by linking the dog to the couple’s infertility and to Ray’s resentments. When the couple learned that they could not have children—a fact that Ray’s narration lays at Mary’s feet—Ray bought his wife a dog, a Jack Russell she named Biznezz. The dog thus first arrived to fill an emotional void but became a daily reminder that the void persists. Ray’s hostility toward Mary’s maternal language underlines the symbolic burden that Biznezz carries: When she promises to “sit with the baby” (56), the narration reveals Ray’s loathing of this pet name. Biznezz is the object of a love that cannot be given to a child, and therefore he is also the most efficient trigger for Ray’s bitterness. From the start, then, Biznezz symbolizes the couple’s unsolved problems and the way compromises can become irritants.
Biz’s association with the Sno Ball develops the dog’s significance further. After Mary goes inside, Ray feeds the dog a fossilized snack cake because he associates both with his wife. His reflection that the cake is “stiff as a corpse” foreshadows both Mary’s fate and Biznezz’s (56), while his remark while tossing the dog the treat, “Everybody has his poison” (57), confirms his displacement of his anger at Mary onto the dog. It suggests both annoyance with Mary’s comments about his smoking and frustration with her perceived hypocrisy, culminating in his symbolic “poisoning” of his wife.
This irony lays the groundwork for his response to discovering the dog’s corpse. Ray’s responsibility for this is more symbolic than literal: Biznezz’s absence from Ray’s thoughts throughout the chaos of his wife’s death reflects his shock, with the locked car becoming the physical correlative of a locked mind. However, the coconut from the Sno Ball is an inescapable reminder of Ray’s earlier antipathy toward Mary and everything associated with her, transforming the dog into a symbol of his own guilt, which is why his first words are an apology.
Biznezz, in these moments, also symbolizes the absurdity of the situation and the way death has made a farce of an errand. The dog’s body, which nearly provokes laughter, is the token that conveys that there is no room left in Ray’s head for ordered emotions or even for a plan about what to do next, gesturing toward the theme of The Absurdity of Death Intruding on the Mundane.
Cigarettes
Cigarettes in “Premium Harmony” are a symbol of marital grievances that are repeated and never resolved. The argument that frames the afternoon is one that the couple has had many times. Ray asks Mary to buy him cigarettes; she responds by pointing out their cost. When Ray defends his thriftiness, claiming that he “saves up and pays a friend in South Carolina to ship him a dozen cartons at a time” (55), he is evidently offering up rehearsed rebuttals in a familiar debate. Mary answers by policing the car as a shared space: She will have to sit amid his cigarette smoke, to which he replies with the practiced assurance that he will open the window, just as he “always [does]” (55). Cigarettes symbolize this pattern of worn-out marital debate, a point underscored by the brand that Ray offers to buy: “Harmony” is precisely what they cannot sustain despite such conciliatory gestures.
Since “premium” is also what they cannot afford, cigarettes also symbolize the couple’s socioeconomic bind, in which every choice must pass through a financial question that humiliates and in which self-destructive consumerism becomes a coping mechanism. Ray does not imagine quitting as a path to freedom; he imagines downgrading. He can “get the cheap ones” (56), even though the Premium Harmony brand tastes bad. The story implies that this addiction is as much psychological as it is physical when Ray tries to convert his smoking into prudence, narrating himself as a savvy consumer who already “tries to economize” (55). Choosing which cigarettes to buy is as important as actually smoking them, as it provides a small measure of agency amid Poverty and Small-Town Discontent.
In the end, cigarettes become the instrument by which Ray tests how to inhabit the space left by death. Standing beside the dead dog, he breaks down but also realizes that now he “can smoke right there at her dining-room table” (62). The line seems defiant, but in context, it is closer to penance. He immediately returns to the counter to ask for a pack and then “smokes all the way to the hospital with the windows shut and the air-conditioning on” (63). Earlier, he promised to crack the window to protect Mary’s lungs. Now, he punishes himself. If cigarettes earlier symbolized the marriage’s attrition and budget constraints, in the final lines, they symbolize a decision to immerse himself in this misery.
Castle Rock
Castle Rock in “Premium Harmony” is a symbol of small-town decay, its landscape defined by chain stores. The couple’s route sketches the town’s economic story in a few lines, wherein Ray jokes that the economy “has disappeared from this part of Maine” (54). The Wal-Mart now dominates everything, to the extent that people joke about it having its own stoplight. The detail about the stoplight is not trivial: The store shapes traffic and time and hints at a civic imagination that does not stretch beyond big brand stores. The choice to stop at the Quik-Pik before Wal-Mart underlines how few options remain. The car rolls “through an almost deserted little town where most of the stores are for sale” (54), showing how Castle Rock has been gutted by the arrival of outside corporations. Even the merchandise in the Quik-Pik points to the town’s decline, like the souvenir shirts that proclaim, “MY PARENTS WERE TREATED LIKE ROYALTY IN CASTLE ROCK AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY TEE-SHIRT” (58), a slogan that mocks the gap between the town’s sense of itself and the inventory it can move.
With the town’s former institutions hollowed out, identity and care become commercialized. The emphasis that Mary places on finding the right ball underscores this point, as does the fact that the community that assembles around Mary’s body is entirely anonymous, linked only by their location in a store. Mr. Ghosh is the only one of these characters to be named, and then only because of his nametag, suggesting a space in which roles replace relationships. In this fluorescent space, sympathy is real but impersonal. The old man offers his story of 37 years of marriage. The woman shares her snack and her tears. Then, the social moment dissipates along the flow of commerce. Customers enter, and the group returns to their jobs and errands. The scene suggests that corporatization has alienated, atomized, and anonymized each person.
Finally, Castle Rock symbolizes the terror of the mundane by demonstrating that horror here requires no supernatural agency. Though the town has featured in other Stephen King stories, often involving the supernatural and the more explicitly horrific, the terror in “Premium Harmony” lies in the ordinariness of the setting and in the ease with which an afternoon of errands turns into a tragedy. The story portrays a version of Castle Rock in which the only monsters are heat, habit, and small-town capitalistic decay. King’s setting insists that the routine is the real antagonist. The terror comes from the fact that the town’s infrastructure, such as it is, continues even as a life ends, implying that preserving lives was never the point.
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