Cujo: An Exercise in Karma

 

By Matthew McConkey 

There are times in Stephen King’s work when the book has a message to give. In Needful Things, King showed us how much we as people could sell practically our souls to gain material possessions that aren’t in the end what we thought they were. In IT, King’s message was that it was okay to be afraid, as long as you knew that you had to be brave and face the monsters (physical or mental) no matter what. In The Stand, the message was loud and clear: we are the creators of our destruction and demise.

Cujo is another novel by King that conveys a powerful message: We are the sum of our decisions. That message is on full display in a novel that King himself admits that he doesn’t remember writing very much. But I’ll bet that he was thinking about more than just a dog with rabies.

On the surface, Cujo is about a St. Bernard that is bitten by a rabid bat and contracts rabies, slowly going mad as he chews people apart who cross his path. There’s more to Cujo in the novel than just murder and mayhem. What’s in the novel other than the oversized dog? How about Cujo being a representation of Karma?

Karma is a Sanskrit term that translates to “action” or “doing.” In the Buddhist tradition, Karma refers to action driven by intention, which leads to future consequences. That’s what this novel is all about: Karma. The actions by Donna Trenton, being the cheating, married woman that she is, and Joe Camber (Cujo’s elder master) being a top-rated prick to his wife over the length of their marriage, set up the bad that the two of them have done to bring about their Karma in a St. Bernard. 

If you believe in the idea that if we do bad things, bad things come back to us, then this novel really sits well with you. If not, then all it is is a book about a rabid dog on a killing spree; he’s Michael Myers with fur. But if you’re like me, you see what Cujo the dog is: Karma, the reaper of all those bad intentions. 

With all the bad things that Donna Trenton and Joe Camber did in their lives that hurt others, it all came to a point at the Camber home. All the decisions and actions that were made led them to Cujo. Hell, even the Cambers getting Cujo when he was a pup was setting the wheels in motion for the future payments he (Joe) and Donna were going to have to settle later down the road.

In looking at Joe Camber, he lost his life to the family dog, and unbeknownst to him at the time of his demise, his wife had already left him. She had finally had enough and went to be with her sister in another town, finally getting away from Joe. She was done with him. When Joe met Cujo that fateful day, Joe had to pay up for all the stuff he had done to his wife over the years. All the bad had come back to him in the form of a St. Bernard that had gone rabid. 

Donna Trenton suffered not the same fate as Joe, but at the end of the book, she wished she had. For cheating on her husband, she lost the most valuable thing she had: her son. Although Cujo didn’t directly kill Tad Trenton, he was a decisive factor in the young boy's death by holding the mother and son hostage in a car as the two of them suffered.

Cujo, the novel isn’t really about the dog at all. It’s about people; it’s about how we all make decisions in our lives, good and bad, that have a way of finding their way back to us. Sometimes, those bad decisions that we put into motion cost us very little. But most of the time, they cost everything we’ve got. 

Cujo the dog is the violence no one saw coming. He was the severe storm that suddenly appeared out of nowhere on a sunny day; there was no warning, no public service announcement, and no town horns firing off warnings to people to take shelter. Cujo was the culmination of Joe and Donna's decisions, a vortex where their lives intersected at the Camber home.

Remember this: if we've done anything wrong, we’ve all got a Cujo coming after us. The question is, will you see him before it's too late?