No two people are the same. They have different clothes, hairstyles, and personalities. However, even external factors may affect people differently. People can be looking at the same painted wall, but might all see it as a slightly different hue. No two people perceive the world in quite the same way. Stephen King’s story Low Men in Yellow Coats shows this idea of varying realities. In the story, Bobby Garfield is an 11-year-old boy who lives with his mother, Liz Garfield, in a small boarding house in Harwich, Connecticut. He looks forward to spending the summer playing with his best friend Sully-John and his quintessential ‘girl-next-door’, Carol Gerber. A new tenant moves into the building in the spring, an old man by the name of Ted Brautigan.
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One day, as Bobby is reading the paper to Ted, Ted begins to ‘sense’ the low men are close to the apartment. His pupils begin growing and shrinking at an alarming rate. Bobby reaches out to calm him down, when he feels an itching in the back of his eyes. The sensation and his friend’s worrisome behaviour scare Bobby, but he justifies it by telling himself this: “No itching behind his eyes, either. Had that itching really even been there? Or had he just made it up because Ted’s eyes were scaring him?” (74). Bobby is choosing to believe he only felt the itching because Ted had told him he would feel it when the low men were near. He writes it off as a hypochondriac sensation. At another point in the story, Ted warns Bobby that the clock in the town square may begin going off at strange times or in between hours as the low men approach. One night, as Bobby is laying in bed, he hears the clock go off for the hour of ten, but, when he looks at his own alarm clock, he sees it is only nine-fifty-two. “All right,” Bobby thinks, “so the clock downtown is a little fast or mine is a little slow. Big deal, McNeal. Go to sleep” (95). Throughout the story, Bobby chooses to ignore the obvious signs of low men, instead claiming that they are just coincidences or he only imagined it because of what Ted has told him. Bobby is altering his perception of reality by refusing to accept the signs …show more content…
She might have been able to calmly ask for an explanation, but, due to what had happened to her the night before at the conference, her reality was skewed. She saw Carol in real danger instead of being helped. The experiences of the characters in the story affected their view of the things happening around them. A person’s emotional state can change the way their world appears to them. Emotions can affect our decisions and views of the world. Throughout Low Men in Yellow Coats, Bobby sees the signs that the low men are approaching. He claims they are only coincidences because he does not want his new friend to leave:
A piece of red ribbon caught on a TV antenna didn’t have to mean anything. … Bobby wasn’t ready to give up. Not on the evidence he had so far. Ted would be upset if Bobby told him what he had seen, maybe upset enough to toss his stuff back into his suitcases … and just take off. If there really were bad guys after him, flight would make sense, but Bobby didn’t want to lose the only adult friend he’d ever had if there weren’t. (70-71)
Bobby’s love for Ted causes him to change his perception of the low men growing closer so that he can stop his friend from leaving him. He is desperate for affection and is willing to alter his reality, no matter what the price might be in the long
One day, as Bobby is reading the paper to Ted, Ted begins to ‘sense’ the low men are close to the apartment. His pupils begin growing and shrinking at an alarming rate. Bobby reaches out to calm him down, when he feels an itching in the back of his eyes. The sensation and his friend’s worrisome behaviour scare Bobby, but he justifies it by telling himself this: “No itching behind his eyes, either. Had that itching really even been there? Or had he just made it up because Ted’s eyes were scaring him?” (74). Bobby is choosing to believe he only felt the itching because Ted had told him he would feel it when the low men were near. He writes it off as a hypochondriac sensation. At another point in the story, Ted warns Bobby that the clock in the town square may begin going off at strange times or in between hours as the low men approach. One night, as Bobby is laying in bed, he hears the clock go off for the hour of ten, but, when he looks at his own alarm clock, he sees it is only nine-fifty-two. “All right,” Bobby thinks, “so the clock downtown is a little fast or mine is a little slow. Big deal, McNeal. Go to sleep” (95). Throughout the story, Bobby chooses to ignore the obvious signs of low men, instead claiming that they are just coincidences or he only imagined it because of what Ted has told him. Bobby is altering his perception of reality by refusing to accept the signs …show more content…
She might have been able to calmly ask for an explanation, but, due to what had happened to her the night before at the conference, her reality was skewed. She saw Carol in real danger instead of being helped. The experiences of the characters in the story affected their view of the things happening around them. A person’s emotional state can change the way their world appears to them. Emotions can affect our decisions and views of the world. Throughout Low Men in Yellow Coats, Bobby sees the signs that the low men are approaching. He claims they are only coincidences because he does not want his new friend to leave:
A piece of red ribbon caught on a TV antenna didn’t have to mean anything. … Bobby wasn’t ready to give up. Not on the evidence he had so far. Ted would be upset if Bobby told him what he had seen, maybe upset enough to toss his stuff back into his suitcases … and just take off. If there really were bad guys after him, flight would make sense, but Bobby didn’t want to lose the only adult friend he’d ever had if there weren’t. (70-71)
Bobby’s love for Ted causes him to change his perception of the low men growing closer so that he can stop his friend from leaving him. He is desperate for affection and is willing to alter his reality, no matter what the price might be in the long