Sean Dorsey – Outside Reading 2 - ‘The Moving Finger’ by Stephen King (in Everything’s Eventual)

‘The Moving Finger’ is a short story that is centered around a man’s struggle with an abhorrent finger that protrudes from his bathroom’s sink’s drain. Though the finger is not in any way the aggressor (barring psychological attacks), the man attempts in any way to remove it from the drain. This culminates in a violent skirmish involving a bottle of bleach and a hedge trimmer, with the police finally coming to the apartment. There, they find the man collapsed on the bathroom floor, pieces of finger everywhere (it is a very long finger), and the man incoherent in after his struggle with what could be seen as a symbol of an attack on reality. As to whether or not this story reveals any of the ‘essence’ as described by Lewis, I would argue that it does so through the consolation that sometimes there are events beyond our control; the theme of the story, after all, is that sometimes bad things - and in this case supernatural - happen for no reason. Do you think this is a true sentiment or simple cynicism or something else entirely?