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Populär Culture Review
in the pictographic language of this third dream. These words force Mort to face
his demons and to reestablish his inner peace while being at the SCHOOL OF
HARD KNOCKS.
Mort’s out-of-body experience makes him scream: “Please help me!
Vm lost and afraid!” (King, Window 255). As Mort’s anxiety and sleep
disruptions increase, his suffering from a “persistent difficulty sleeping,”
creating a “sleep-deprived equilibrium” (Dement 130) that intensifies. Due to
the “more frequent awakenings from sleep, and [the] poorer overall sleep
quality” (Levin 494), Mort is incapable of finding any physical or emotional
rest. Consequently, Mort’s already existing emotional distress worsens and
instigates an enhancement of Mort’s night terrors and parasomniac violence as
both are linked to the process of disturbing imagery with a high affect load
during REM sleep.
As the story continues, Mort’s dreams become an indistinguishable
haunting part of reality. He is no longer capable of distinguishing between what
is real and what is not. His suffering from derealization gives everything around
him a “sense of unreality” (King, Window 257). The resulting intellectual
uncertainty and unfamiliarity of the Situation in combination with the haunting
notion of betrayal prompt a frequent reoccurrence of a man who “doesn’t look
exactly real” (King, Window 241) but rather resembles “a character out of a
novel by William Faulkner” (King, Window 241): John Shooter. He is a man
whose identity is an artifact consisting of the following ideas: a fictional
character with a strong southem accent just like John Kintner; a writer who
reminds Mort of his failure as a Professional writer by accusing him of
plagiarism; a stranger who wears Mort’s hat, is imitating his voice, and is
wearing his clothes, 3 a person, whose name is a pseudonym for Ted’s
hometown Shooter’s Knob. John Shooter is nothing eise than an outer
manifestation of Mort’s repressed double. He is the writer’s dark half.
Who am I? Meeting John Shooter, Meeting Myself
On the one hand, John Shooter can be read as the personification of
Mort Rainey’s shame, helplessness, betrayal, unsuccessfulness, and guilt. On the
other hand, the imaginary flgure is the embodiment of Mort’s unrealistic selfidealization or what he thought he ought to be—a successfixl writer. John
Shooter is the epitome of the author’s repressed identity, his suppressed past
“that ought to have remained hidden and secret, but yet comes to light” (Freud,
Uncanny 376) in a state of transient and intermittent insomnia4 provoked by
psychological stress, depression, and alcoholic intoxication. In this respect, the
usually unconscious phenomenon of idealization has become a threatening
obstacle “that substitutes for realistic self-confidence and realistic pride”
(Homey 100). The familiär has taken an unfamiliar form of appearance and as
such comprises the converged meaning of the two German words, heimlich
(homely) and unheimlich (wild, mysterious, uncanny). Shooter reminds Mort of