Good And Evil In Stephen King's The Stand

Stephen King’s The Stand is said to be an extremely lengthy novel about the hardships of mankind and the battles of good and evil. At first sight, while it may seem to be all about how the extremes of good and evil fight and give balance, The Stand goes deeper than that. Stephen King isn’t writing about our extremes, but about how we perceive them. People see the world in extremes: black and white, good and bad, etc., but the vast majority of the things that make up our world fall somewhere between the extremes that make up our classification categories. So, we should stop trying to judge everything, especially people, based on which extreme we view them to be a part of. After the events of a global influenza pandemic that kills 99.4% of people worldwide, the characters of The Stand divide into two groups; one is led by the embodiment of all good and the other by the embodiment of all evil. The “good” group, which is found in Boulder, Colorado, starts to fill with decent, respectful, and generally happy people, but is struggling to form a government that can both function efficiently and respect human rights. The “evil” group, found in Las Vegas, Nevada, is filled with united and hardworking people who may have been led astray in life, but work quickly and …show more content…
They murdered people in service of the most evil being on the planet, so of course they deserve life in prison or some equivalent to that, but they should still be treated with respect and dignity. People, regardless of what they’ve done, are still people and should be treated as such. Only complete monsters or rapscallions: the people who’ve only done bad things, the people with no remorse, the people who can only ever fit into our “bad” categories, should be treated inhumanely or as if nothing they could ever do would be