Why does everyone float in Derry?

One of the most enigmatic phrases in Stephen King’s novel IT is the “everyone floats” that Pennywise uses repeatedly. What is the reason, and what exactly does the clown mean by “float?”

The phrase, in all its variants, is mentioned many times in the novel, whether in the mouths of Pennywise or the Losers; However, the first character to refer to this is Georgie, more precisely when she asks the clown if the balloon he is offering her floats. At this point it is a technical question, let’s say, stripped of sinister content. Georgie just wants to know if the balloon floats or if it’s a regular balloon. Does Pennywise just end up liking the phrase, using it over and over again from then on, or does it have some other meaning?

Stephen King uses variations of the word “float” 117 times in the novel, and it can be interpreted in several ways.

First, all variants of “float” are a narrative device that betrays the presence of IT. Many times throughout the novel, Stephen King uses “hover” to directly allude to IT’s presence or involvement in some situation, thereby announcing to the reader that things may get ugly, as in the following case:

, a chalk-white cylinder, like a ghost in the fog and gathering darkness. It almost seemed to…float. That was a strange thought. He guessed that it must have come from his own head, where else could it come from? But somehow it didn’t seem like his at all.]

Stan Uris may well doubt this but the reader knows, from the moment the word “float” appears, that IT is involved in the matter.

The second way in which Stephen King uses “hover” in the novel can be interpreted as a translation of the horrors of Pennywise into children’s language. The “we’re all floating down here” could be interpreted literally as the corpses of IT’s victims floating in the sewers, but the meaning Stephen King is trying to convey to the reader is probably a little more complex than that.

To “float,” as Pennywise intends, is to float in the Will-o’-the-Wisps.

The Wisps is a place deep in Stephen King’s Macroverse; in fact, the place IT originally came from. On the other hand, IT has two forms simultaneously: its physical form on Earth and its cosmological form in the Will-o’-the-Wisps; You could almost say that he “floats” between these two forms, and that is what he essentially wants from his victims: that their bodies be destroyed or absorbed into their physical form as food, but that their minds be under the dominion of their cosmological form. in the Wisps.

That is to say that the victims of IT really “float” between physical death and metaphysical death, never being truly free. In this context, we can understand why Georgie’s question about whether the balloon would float resonated in IT’s mind. In fact, the clown seems to take glee in informing Georgie that she would do it, and that he would float too.

In the novel, Stephen King does not commit to a single interpretation, but rather to all of them, so that “floating” works very well on different levels, even on the most prosaic: the fact that the children end up floating in the sewers, and some of them in the flooded lands of the wastelands. However, it is evident that IT refers more specifically to this intermediate existence of physical death and mental imprisonment in the Will-o’-the-Wisps when it refers to “floating”:

Just as Pennywise uses “hovering” to confuse the characters, Stephen King uses it as an internal device to guide them through the story. They have to find out what it means. The Losers do not aim to simply assimilate the phrase, but to know what is behind it. Plus, they already know that IT lives beneath Derry, and it wouldn’t have been much of a leap to go from that knowledge to the image of bodies floating in the sewers.

At least once in the book, Pennywise is very amused when Georgie asks him “does it float?” her when she offers him a balloon. From this moment on, “you too will float” becomes a kind of mantra for him, appearing several times in his encounters with the Losers. At this point it is legitimate to wonder if the globes that IT materializes or imprints on the minds of its victims are not actually a representation of the Will-o’-the-Wisps on the physical or mental plane; Terrifying, no doubt, but not enough to break the minds of their victims. Let’s remember that IT is seasoning its victims with fear before devouring them.

IT’s earthly essence, as well as his true extradimensional form, are composed of the Will-o’-the-Wisps, and he often uses their power to blind his new victims and steal their minds. This implies that the Wisps and IT itself feed not only on the fear and flesh of their prey, but also on their souls, making death just the beginning of the torment they must endure.

Pennywise’s spider form is the closest our minds can come to understanding the Will-o’-the-Wisp without losing our sanity. It’s not clear why, but that’s how it seems to be in the universe of the story. On the other hand, there are very few who have seen the Will-o’-the-Wisps and survived to tell about it in therapy; only Bill Denbrough’s wife, Audra; Richie Tozier and Beverly Marsh

There’s not much more we can contribute on the subject, but we can’t rule out a rather prosaic reason for IT’s “everyone floats”: it’s simply disturbing, and it works from the first dialogue between IT and Georgie, something that a serial killer you might say to attract their victims.

It doesn’t take many appearances of IT in the novel for the reader to notice this pattern: Pennywise always lets the children know that they will “float”… in every possible sense, as we have seen so far. On the one hand, she’s telling them that they will eventually end up suspended in extradimensional space, a dimension inhabited by the most horrifying of Lovecraftian creatures. On the other, their bodies will float in the fetid waters beneath Derry.

In the novel, Stephen King spends a substantial portion of the story describing the sewers, tunnels, and drains beneath Derry, which lead to the stretch of river that runs through the forest just outside the city limits. Each of Pennywise’s victims are always found near water, such as under bridges or at the mouth of sewers, which not only cleverly associates the life-giving liquid with rot and death, but also strongly implies that The “they all float” is referring to what the corpses will do after Pennywise is done with them.