Ultimately, the man must fight back and destroy her in order to get back to civilization. The character displays elements of the borderline personality as well as obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. Annie Wilkes is presented as an obsessive-compulsive personality in the way she keeps her home, in the way she becomes dedicated so thoroughly to this writer and his works (and especially to the one character of Misery, with whom she identifies so closely), and in the expectations she has placed in the past on her patients and now on this particular patient. Davison and Neale identify the obsessive-compulsive personality as a perfectionist, preoccupied with details, rules, schedules, and so on. They state that such people are also work rather than pleasure oriented. They are inflexible, and their interpersonal relationships suffer as a result (Davison and Neale 269-270). Annie Wilkes is seen as obsessive-compulsive in the way everything has to be just so, from the books she reads to the way her house is kept. She has a variety of knick-knacks everywhere, and each must be in its proper place. She wants every element in life to be in its proper place, and she becomes incensed when it is not so. She expects the Misery books to be part of her life always, and her reaction to the news that this will no longer be so is violent and shows how dependent her personality is upon the imposed order of these novels. Her captive is expected to live up to all her idealized images of him as a writer, as a human being, and as a patient, and any deviation from the norm she sets is met with violent confrontation. Presumably she was also disappointed in the reality of the patients she killed -- they failed to live up to her expectations of them as patients and did not do as well in treatment as required, so to restore order she killed them.

When she encourages her captive to write, she is obsessive about providing him with precisely the tools needed, from a typewriter to the proper...

She is also obsessive in assuring herself that every piece of paper is used, that every pencil is returned, that every element in the room is kept in precise order. She controls the situation completely, both in and out of the house, and she becomes anxious only when it seems that he sense of order is to be violated, as when the Sheriff comes or when she encounters problems in the village where she shops. To restore order, she becomes violent once more.
The exigence for King is to instill fear in his audience, though at the same time he presents an image of the writer as suffering from torments placed on him by his fans, suggesting a certain desire to express his own personal suffering. In his review of the film, Roger Ebert writes,

Stephen King has a modest but undeniable genius for being able to find horror in everyday situations. My notion is that he starts with a germ of truth from his own life, and then takes it as far as he can into the macabre and the bizarre. (Ebert para. 1) among the constraints on a film are the images used, the way the director and other film makers shape the narrative and the various elements of the film, and how the film makers shape and alter the original story from the novel. In this case, there is a close match between the novel and the film as far as the story and the thematic elements of the film are concerned. The way the film was made captures and communicates the voice of the rhetor and serves the exigence of his communication.

Works Cited

Bitzer, Lloyd F. "The Rhetorical Situation." Philosophy and Rhetoric (1991), 1-14.

Davison, Gerald C. And John M. Neale. Abnormal Psychology. New York: John Wiley, 1994.

Ebert, Roger. "Misery." RogerEbert.com. 30 November 1990. December 2, 2007. http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19901130/REVIEWS/11300301/1023.

Reiner, Rob. Misery. Castle Rock Entertainment, 1990.