The suicide of Stanley Uris

Stanley Uris is probably the most disconcerting character in Stephen King’s novel IT, due to the fact that he is the only one who commits suicide when his memories of his childhood in Derry return. Because? After all, the other six members of the Losers Club’s encounters with IT were just as bad as Stan’s, and didn’t lead them to make such a drastic decision. Something in particular pushed Stanley Uris over the edge, but Stephen King refrains from explaining what; However, he leaves some crumbs that we will diligently try to pick up (see: Georgie vs. Pennywise: The Archetypal Basement)

At this point we can propose two possibilities:

a- Stan Uris is the most skeptical member of the Losers Club, someone who trusts logic and reason more than anyone. After all, he is the last to accept that Pennywise really exists (see: What is “IT” really?). Paradoxically, that logically robust mentality makes him too emotionally fragile to face it a second time.

b- Stephen King implies that Stanley Uris is the only one who somehow knows that IT is female, something that Bill, Richie and Ben notice in their second encounter with Pennywise as adults. Therefore, Stan Uris chose death rather than return to Derry to face a terror that, in his experience, could multiply indefinitely.

The first suggestion is probably true, but so is the second, and perhaps a third, which we will explore later.

The Stanley Uris of 1958 is described as a neat, formal boy. He is one of the few Jewish kids at school, something that made him a favorite victim of Henry Bowers and other bullies. Not only do the bad guys find in his condition as a Jew a foothold to be simply cruel to him; Richie’s jokes, although not malicious, also have to do with this. While the Uris family is Jewish, they don’t follow the practice very strictly, so much so that Stan doesn’t even know exactly what it means to be kosher, attending synagogue in Bangor only for important holidays like Yom Kippur.

Stephen King doesn’t delve too deeply into this aspect, but Stan Uris seems to have a close relationship with his parents, although they seem to put a lot of pressure on him. At one point, Bill and Eddie claim that it’s typical for Jews to have big noses and a lot of money, but that Stan had a normal nose and never seemed to have enough money (see: “IT”: The Great Modern Fairy Tale).

Stephen King describes Stanley Uris as a methodical boy, so much so that his favorite hobby is bird watching; In fact, he rarely detaches himself from the book of birds, which will be his main weapon to fight against IT. At all times he is portrayed as someone very mature for his age, and with some degree of obsession with personal hygiene. He is also the most skeptical of the group, which is curious, because this ends up having the opposite effect than expected: he is the most fearful of the Losers for being unable to accept the events around him from the beginning.

Essentially, Stanley Uris is terrified to believe IT is real. In the novel, he is shown to have a strange sense of humor that the rest of the group does not understand most of the time.

Stan’s rational spirit makes him reluctant to tell others about his encounter with IT. He only mentions it when he helps Beverly Marsh wash the blood-stained rags from her own encounter with IT in the laundry room (see: Beverly Marsh: the myth of Snow White in “IT”). As Richie, Stan Uris tries to reassure himself that his encounter was a dream, and later tries to convince himself that he had suffered an epileptic seizure of some kind, as it was easier to accept this than the possibility that IT was real. .

Stan Uris’s encounter with IT occurs one day when he is bird watching in the park, where the water tank is. The tank door is open and, out of curiosity, he decides to venture out and take a look. As he goes up the stairs he hears footsteps and then sees shadows. The door behind him slams shut. A voice begins to call him, claiming that they are the dead. Terrified, he hugs his bird book, and begins to recite as many bird names as he can remember. Strangely, this seems to cause the door to open, finally allowing you to return to the park. However, when he turns his head, he sees a hand making an inviting gesture for him to return.

Stanley Uris’s rational mindset is useful for logical, scientific thinking, but totally inadequate for processing the supernatural. Stan simply has great difficulty accepting the existence of IT, for example, when the group looks at the photo album and the images suddenly come to life. Stan cannot deal with what he has just seen, he closes in on himself, begins to repeat no and deny what he has seen. He just accepts it, or rather, he admits it, when Bill tells him that everyone else has seen it too.

Already in the sewers, Stanley Uris is the one who feels most uncomfortable and terrified, curiously, not so much because of IT, but because of the fact that he is dirty and disoriented. Emerging from the sewers after defeating IT for the first time, Stan leaves the group momentarily to retrieve a discarded Coca Cola bottle. He breaks it on a nearby rock and uses a shard of the glass to cut everyone’s palms to perform the Blood Oath. Even at this moment he makes a joke, saying that it would be better to cut his wrists than the palm of his hand, a foreshadowing of his suicide as an adult. In fact, Bill considers stopping him because he’s not sure if his friend is joking or not.

After all of the Losers’ palms bleed, they shake hands in a circle and Bill insists that they make a pact: they would all return to Derry to fight once again and defeat IT once and for all (see: 9 Things That you didn’t know about the IT clown)

The adult Stanley Uris of 1985 is a successful accountant and is happily married to Patricia, an attractive and loving woman, with whom he tried to have children for a long time but without success. Stephen King adds that, despite having seen many specialists, they are both perfectly healthy and there is no reason for Patricia not to get pregnant. Stan is partially aware of his past experiences, and also that these are the reason why he and his wife cannot conceive (see: Jack and Danny Torrance: A Fairy Tale at the Overlook Hotel).

This half-consciousness is directly related to his suicide. When Mike calls him to tell him that IT has returned to Derry and that everyone would have to return to fight him, Stanley Uris’s memories come back immediately, unlike the others. After the phone call, he tells his wife that he will take a bath. Patricia eventually finds it strange that Stan took a shower so late and goes to ask him if everything was okay. There, she notices that Stan has cut his wrists in a T shape. With his own blood she writes the word IT on the bathroom wall.

Here is a later detail that sheds some light on Stanley Uris’ suicide.

Later in the story, when the Losers are gathered in the Derry library, their memories begin to return, and the wounds they had made on their palms, during the oath, begin to open. In other words, when the Losers regain their memories, the wounds open. In this context, Stanley Uris remembers everything the same night he receives Mike’s call, therefore, it is fair to assume that the wounds on his hand opened while he was bathing.

This leads us to wonder: Did Stan go to the bathroom with the intention of committing suicide in the first place, or was it there, when his wound opened, that he decided to continue it on his wrist, thus forming a T.

Stan Uris was always the most aware of the Losers. He was always the most honest, the most adult. Significantly, his encounter with IT in the park is described as beyond terrifying. Stan finds it offensive. IT’s existence offends his sense of the natural order of the universe. Let us remember that his hobby was bird watching, which consists of detecting, recording the sighting and confirming the species. As an adult he became an accountant. A profession that demands precision. When he was a child, Stan’s mind was still flexible enough to half-accept IT’s existence. As an adult, his mind is much more rigid, such that he has no tools to process IT’s return.

Let’s take into account the professions of the rest of the Losers: Bill became a fiction author, Beverly a fashion designer, Ben an architect, Richie a comedian… Only Eddie and Stan choose professions that do not depend on creativity. In adulthood, most people lose the intellectual flexibility of childhood. In the case of Stanley Uris, this proved fatal. Mike’s phone call swept away the protective amnesia with which the Losers had clothed their past, and Stan’s orderly, logical world shattered into a thousand pieces.

In other words, Stan Uris could not face as an adult what he could barely face as a child. The weight of his disbelief was too great to lift. On the other hand, he couldn’t deny the essential reality of the situation either. And instead of accepting it and dealing with it, he opts for suicide; a sad exit, no doubt, but understandable in someone who cannot fight something that SHOULD NOT exist.

Stanley Uris never recovered from PTSD after the fight with IT in the sewers, where Pennywise nearly bit off his face. In Stephen King’s novel, each character’s encounter with IT acts as a parallel to each character’s greatest fears, and Stan’s lifelong trauma is subtly revealed as a victim of anti-Semitism. This is explained in the harsh life story of his wife, Patricia, just as the plot leads to her suicide.

Stanley Uris is the Loser we know the least about. His suicide sets much of the tone for the others’ half of the story as adults, and gives the survivors the sense that a second fight against IT is largely a lost battle. Stan was a pillar of the group. His meek nature often tempers Richie’s more bombastic personality and generally supports the entire friend group with his presence. The void he creates with his death is profound, and is felt by others as they fight not only for their lives, but for the lives of the children of Derry.

Stephen King paints a beautiful and melancholic picture of the adult life of Stan Uris, a tender, methodical and responsible man who adores his wife. Together, Stan and Patty are happy and have a healthy relationship. Of course, there are problems. Stan and Patty cannot conceive even though neither of them is infertile. It’s interesting that Stan, besides Mike, the one who remembers his childhood best, is prone to saying cryptic things that his wife doesn’t fully understand, like The Turtle couldn’t help us.

Stanley Uris…