The voices of our dead friends, or just the gramophone

The expression “The voices of our dead friends, or just the gramophone?” names an uncertainty at the heart of Dan Torrance’s encounter with Eleanor Ouellette: whether the dead are genuinely present or their voices are only an echo. First spoken by Eleanor as a line she attributes to the poet George Seferis, the question returns in Dan’s thoughts without receiving an answer.

Eleanor’s account

At Rivington House in the fall of 2013, the 102-year-old Eleanor tells Dan that many people are passing before her in an endless parade. They smile and bow; a child wags his tongue like a dog’s tail, and some speak. Asked who has been visiting, Eleanor answers with Seferis’s question: “Are these the voices of our dead friends, or just the gramophone?” The image gives her reported encounters a double possibility: they may be presences of the dead, or repetitions whose apparent voices do not establish who—or what—is speaking.

Eleanor’s examples make the question concrete rather than abstract. Among the passing figures, she identifies a boy who fell down a well and a woman who killed herself with a bedspring. The brief, stark histories connect the apparitions to deaths, while Eleanor’s gramophone comparison leaves their nature unsettled.

Dan’s return to the question

Dan does not see the figures Eleanor describes. He knows that other presences may be possible, but has no sense of them in that moment. Later he reaches for Abra’s mind and finds nothing, wondering whether she is guarding her thoughts or whether his own sensitivity has departed; he expects it to return, as it always has before. Against that uncertainty, the question recurs in his mind: “Are these the voices of our dead friends, or just the gramophone?” Its repetition carries Eleanor’s question beyond her bedside without resolving it.

Silence and ambiguity

The question’s return comes amid an unusually quiet night. Dan hears no conversation from the common room, no television or radio, no footsteps from Poul Larson, no voices from the nurses’ station, and no ringing phone. When he checks his watch, its faint ticking is absent because it has stopped. These details do not explain Eleanor’s visions or confirm what Dan can perceive; instead, they place the recurring question in a scene where even familiar sounds are missing. The gramophone remains an image of possible playback, not a verdict on whether the dead are present.