In Stephen King's short story "The Jaunt", what do you think happens to the inventor Victor Carune? Here's my speculation with spoilers
So we're reading The Jaunt for a course, when I first read the story I didn't really think much of it since I didn't know where the story was going. But now reading it for the second time,
I think just like Mrs. Michaelson, Victor Carune, the inventor of the jaunt, is also jaunting for all of eternity.
Here's some proof
The line "He did not push his fingers back in; in fact, Carune only Jaunted once more in his entire life" seems super ominous to me, why would he even jaunt once when he's the inventor? Since he knows the horrors of it, why would he jaunt at all? or , as I think, was he made to jaunt?
And then the mc says Carune was never made the head of the research team, and his daughter says he was at least a hero and made it in the history books. MC says, "I'm sure that's a great comfort to him ...... wherever he is". So we do say wherever he is when someone dies, but in the context of this short story it seems so sus, we don't know where he is, just like Mrs. Michaelson.
Next he says, "three years before he officially died, he rode in the pace-car at the Tournament of Roses Parade. Puzzling. And a little ominous." I don't think the text says why riding in the pace car is ominous but let's keep the name Tournament of Roses in mind. Not to mention it says "before he officially died", as if the death is not real.
They mention this book by C. K. Summers's The Politics of the Jaunt where there's a section called "The Jaunt Under the Rose" with more believable rumors that the Jaunt has. It says the Jaunt was used as a murder weapon, where they mention the Mrs. Michaelson case. So the text goes, "In the most famous (and only documented) case", and then describes the Michaelsons incident. Again the "only documented" part might be a hint that other cases did happen but were not documented and I'm suspecting Carune is one of them. And the section is called "The Jaunt Under the Rose", reminiscent of the parade name Tournament of Roses??
Finally it says, "Summers suggested, the Jaunt had been used by various tinpot dictators to get rid of political dissidents and political adversaries." And in the passage about Carune riding the pace car three years before his "official" death, and the paragraph before that too, we learn about how Victor Carune was a problem and remained a problem until 1991. So perhaps they jaunted Carune like Mrs. Michaelson because he was being a political threat just by existing? Not to mention he was actively avoiding letting the government know about the jaunt for as long as he could.
So all these subtle hints made me think Carune did in fact get jaunted to eternity. Ironic how the very person who invented it was made to suffer the same fate as its other victims.