The Body

“That’s the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.”

Gordie often hesitates to tell or show people his stories. Even when they’re good, he knows that he can’t control how people will react or how they might interpret his work. When he tells a story to someone who doesn’t understand why it matters so much to him, he regrets telling it at all. Chris encourages him to write everything down because he knows how important it is for Gordie to share his work. 

“You guys want to go see a dead body?” 

Vern casually proposes the adventure that becomes the end of the boys’ childhood. A morbid adventure, it reveals the boys’ immaturity and naiveté because rather than reporting the corpse’s location to the police, they go to see it. They think only in terms of excitement—and the fame that finding the body might bring them. 

“Chris came from a bad family, all right, and everybody thought he would turn out bad…including Chris.” 

Chris believes that he’ll amount to nothing. He views himself as an inevitable extension of his family’s violence and low standing in the community. During the trek to see the body, Chris and Gordie have the discussions that eventually lead Gordie to helping Chris gain entrance to college. Chris manages to transcend his upbringing, which might not have happened without the deeper bond that he and Gordie forged on the trip to see the body.  

“You always know the truth, because when you cut yourself or someone else with it, there’s always a bloody show.” 

Gordie looks back at his story Stud City with fondness. He knows that his brother Dennis’s death—and the events during the journey to see the body—inspired parts of the story. He never showed it to his parents because they wouldn’t have understood what was behind it. The story’s truth would’ve hurt someone close to Gordie, like many of the truths in The Body.  

“We knew exactly who we were and exactly where we were going. It was grand.” 

Gordie experiences a rare moment of complete certainty at the journey’s beginning. As an adult, he often wonders if he’s making the best use of his life. As a child, his parents neglect him in the wake of Dennis’s death, making him question his place in the family. Gordie knows exactly where he stands with his friends, and he loves the fact that they’re pursuing an adventure together. He experiences a calm as a child that often eludes him as an adult.

“People. People drag you down.

Before Chris tells Gordie that his friends will drag him down, he reveals that he believes all people have the potential to drag each other down. Chris doesn’t have healthy relationships outside their group of friends. He associates close connections with violence and mistrust. He also knows that even if he wants to enroll in college courses, the administrators who already have preconceived notions about him (because of his family) have the power to prevent him from furthering his education. 

“Your friends drag you down, Gordie. Don’t you know that?” 

Chris is upset that Gordie wants to take lower-level classes like shop to stay with his friends in school. Chris sees potential in Gordie that he doesn’t see in the others. He knows that Gordie’s mind is a gift and that using his ability to tell stories will benefit him more than staying behind with his friends. Personally, his friends are an important part of his life. Professionally, Chris knows that they could hold him back. 

“I want to go someplace where nobody knows me and I don’t have any black marks against me before I start.” 

Chris wants to leave Castle Rock for a fresh start. His family’s reputation limits his ability to make progress or gain acceptance from his hometown community. This passage foreshadows the effort that he and Gordie make in junior high as they work to help Chris catch up with his studies. Gordie knows he can help Chris—not only to get into college but to start a real life for himself elsewhere.  

“It’s hard to make strangers care about the good things in your life.” 

Gordie thinks about seeing the deer after being the first to wake. It was his favorite part of the trip. He doesn’t tell his friends about it, though he came close. He never told anyone else—until writing it down for the story—because he knows that strangers would never care as much as Teddy, Vern, and Chris would have. As an adult, Gordie uses his stories to tell strangers about his experiences and feelings, but he always knows that readers can’t understand him the way that his friends could. 

“The only reason anyone writes stories is so they can understand the past and get ready for some future mortality.” 

Gordie almost tells his editor, Keith, about his reasons for writing stories. Writing The Body is his attempt to understand how significant the walk to Ray’s body was for the child Gordie Lachance. His writing is simultaneously an exploration of his past and a way to remind himself of his own mortality. This is ironic because when Gordie tells stories he seems happy to be an entertainer, yet when he writes stories down, his motivations change. 

“The only two useful artforms are religion and stories.” 

Gordie views art as the attempt to express something that is inexpressible in another way. Religion and storytelling are, in his opinion, the most effective attempts at this expression. In pairing stories with religion, Gordie implies that he considers stories in some way sacred. Stories allow him to examine his life and discover what is most meaningful to him. By writing about his friends and the story of the body, he reveals how significant the experience was for him.  

“If small events really echo up larger and larger through time, yes, maybe if we had done the simple thing and hitched into Harlow, they would still be alive today.” 

After revealing that his friends would all die by the time he was in his early thirties, Gordie wonders about the choice they made to keep walking up the train tracks. He does not go as far as blaming the choice for their deaths. However, he’s aware that he can never know how differently their lives might have turned out if they’d abandoned the search for Ray’s body sooner. Gordie’s writing as an adult is a continuation of this process—making sense of what happened and the results that their choices may have produced. 

“There’s a high ritual to all fundamental events, the rites of passage, the magic corridor where the change happens. Buying the condoms. Standing before the minister. Raising your hand and taking the oath. Or, if you please, walking down the railroad tracks to meet a fellow your own age halfway.” 

Looking back, Gordie understands that their search for Ray’s body had ritualistic elements that align with many coming of age experiences. However, their rite of passage involved a dead boy and the violence perpetrated on them later by Ace and his friends. Gordie’s coming of age story is grim and foreshadows his lifelong preoccupation with death and horror. 

“‘What am I doin’ here, anyway?’ Teddy muttered.” 

As they approach the body, the storm worsens. For Teddy and Gordie, the excitement they felt turns to dread and confusion. Gordie has felt that forces they don’t understand are pulling them towards the body, but now he and Teddy are confused about why they’ve put themselves in this situation or why it was so irresistible. Teddy’s question has implications for each of the four friends; they’re all outsiders—even within their own families. Other than Gordie’s compulsion to write, they’re largely unsure of their purpose or path in life. 

“The kid was can’t, don’t, won’t, never, shouldn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t.” 

When they finally reach Ray Brower’s body, the gravity of his death dawns on Gordie. He imagines all the things that Ray will never be able to do. All the future moments of his former life are gone. The body is no longer a person. For Gordie, it symbolizes mortality. 

“He was a boy our age, he was dead, and I rejected the idea that anything about it could be natural; I pushed it away with horror.” 

As an adult, Gordie fights the urge to return to the site of the body to find the blueberry pot Ray was supposedly carrying. He feels the urge as strongly as if he were the pre-adolescent Gordie who couldn’t resist going to see the body. He identifies with both his 12-year-old self and Ray Brower. Ray was literally dead, but Gordie’s remaining childlike innocence died that day. 

“That boy was me, I think. And the thought which followed, chilling me like a dash of cold water, is: Which boy do you mean?” 

As an adult, Gordie fights the urge to return to the site of the body to find the blueberry pot Ray was supposedly carrying. He feels the urge as strongly as if he were the pre-adolescent Gordie who couldn’t resist going to see the body. He identifies with both his 12-year-old self and Ray Brower. Ray was literally dead, but Gordie’s remaining childlike innocence died that day. 

“He was ours.”

Chris says this before he says good-bye to Gordie. Gordie later recognizes the trip to see the body as a coming of age for each of them. Ray belongs to them because he changed their lives and began their transition into adulthood. 

“Love has teeth; they bite; the sounds never close. No word, no combination of words, can close those lovebites. It’s the other way around, that’s the joke. If those wounds dry up, the words die with them.” 

Gordie thinks about the nature of love as he reflects on his last conversation with Chris before leaving the body. Chris and Gordie are vulnerable with each other in a way that they aren’t with Teddy and Vern. As an adult, Gordie realizes that love comes with a cost. Love can be the most fulfilling part of life, but it also requires the acceptance of loss and pain. 

“Speech destroys the functions of love, I think—that’s a hell of a thing for a writer to say, I guess, but I believe it to be true.” 

When Gordie says good-bye to Chris, he wishes he knew what to say. He thinks that words can harm as much as they can help and that some things have their own language beyond the reach of words. Love is a feeling that description cheapens. 

“Some people drown, that’s all. It’s not fair, but it happens. Some people drown.”

Gordie contemplates Vern and Teddy drifting out of his life. He remembers the dream of corpses pulling his legs underwater. When he thinks about friends leaving, he accepts it as an unfair reality. Friends come and go, and some people die unjustly, without any rationality. 

“It was only survival. We were clinging to each other in deep water. I’ve explained about Chris, I think; my reasons for clinging to him were less definable. His desire to get away from Castle Rock and out of the mill’s shadow seemed to me to be my best part, and I could not just leave him to sink or swim on his own. If he had drowned, that part of me would have drowned with him, I think.” 

Chris and Gordie both dated girls in high school, but they remained close and always made time for each other. Chris depends on Gordie for help with his studies and because Gordie understands him so well. Gordie depends on Chris because Chris is a way for him to use his mind to help someone he cares about. Gordie values his ability to help his friend, and abandoning him would have meant losing an important piece of himself. 

“I wonder if there is really any point to what I’m doing, or what I’m supposed to make of a world where a man can get rich playing ‘let’s pretend.’” 

Writing makes Gordie wealthy, but he’s always uncertain about how meaningful his work is. When Gordie describes his career trajectory, it’s like that of Stephen King, The Body’s true author. King has expressed similar doubts about his own work and the implications of his success. However, while some critics disdain genre fiction—or all fiction—Gordie’s success implies that people find his work meaningful enough to reward him for it financially.