Stephen King's 'The Running Man'

Stephen King’s “The Running Man” is a very tough book to summarise. There are many things that happen throughout it, but due to the nature of the situation, in the end everything around Ben Richards gets destroyed, causing many things that may seem to be key events to have very little impact on the ending of the story. The basic story, removing all of these elements, is that a man named Ben Richards is living an impoverished life in some random town in the U.S., and signs up for a death game called The Running Man to make a whole bunch of money so he can get his daughter’s pneumonia treated. The whole idea of The Running Man is that a man goes on the run for 30 days from the authorities and a group of people called the hunters who are chasing

At the start of the book, Ben is a racist man. When he was doing various tests to see if he was fit to sign up for The Running Man, he was asked to do some word association. When the doctor said”’Doctor.’ ‘Nigger,’ Richards responded”(34). When Killian was interviewing Richards, he was looking over his record, and states “‘you held racial responses outlawed by the Racial Act of 2004’”(50). The thing is, Richards grows as a character when he meets Bradley, a black man who really helps him out. Bradley gave Richards a ride to Manchester, and got him a car, a disguise, and a place to stay as well. Richards, although at first he didn’t particularly care for the fact that he was stuck with Bradley and his family, he listened to Bradley talk about how awfully polluted the air was and how Richards could help raise awareness about this by talking about it on the tapes he sends in. On The Running Man, a contestant is required to record and mail in two tapes to be shown to the public as they are being updated on the hunt for the contestant. This situation helped Richards to bond with Bradley, causing him to grow as a person in how he became less ignorant towards colored folks. Another way in which Richards displays the caring side of himself is in how he treats Amelia, his hostage. Even though Richards had every reason to hate her due to her being part of the upper middle class, the people who eat up how evil the games paint him out to be, he treats her nicely, regardless of whether she returns the favor. A good example of this is when Amelia commented “‘You’re an enemy of the Network… It says so on the Free-Vee. I saw some of the disgusting things you did.’ ‘You know what’s disgusting?’ Richards asked… ‘It’s disgusting to get blackballed because you don’t want to work in a General Atomics job that’s going to make you