The Body

Fiction | Novella | YA | Published in 1982

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-12

Chapters 13-24

Chapters 25-34

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Themes

The Purpose of Stories

Gordie begins the book by writing, “The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them—words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out” (1). Immediately, this reveals that the following story is Gordie’s attempt to express something important while also accepting that it won’t convey the full depth of his experience.

Gordie’s friends beg him to tell stories. The story about Davie Hogan and the pie eating contest is perfect for the campfire setting and brilliantly represents Gordie’s creativity and sense of humor. At the campfire, he’s a pure entertainer. He also tells Le Dio stories because they’re entertaining and they comfort Teddy.

The adult Gordie’s examination of Stud City shows another side of his storytelling. It’s the first story he ever finished. In hindsight, he realizes that Stud City was his first, fumbling attempt to write about sexuality, about his brother’s death and the void it left in his home, and about his need to find his own path in life. He enjoyed writing the story, but it was also useful for him.

As an adult, Gordie admits that “writing is my work and the pleasure has diminished a little” (89) even though it’s made him rich. Near the story’s conclusion, he wonders whether “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’” (178). In any event, stories are how Gordie learns about himself. He writes, “The only two useful artforms are religion and stories,” (131). By placing storytelling in the same category as religion, Gordie reveals that storytelling is almost sacred to him—even though he insists that writing diminishes some truths.

Chris sees Gordie’s storytelling ability as a divine gift: “It’s like God gave you something, all these stories you can make up, and He said, ‘This is what we got for you, kid, try not to lose it. But kids lose everything unless somebody looks out for them” (108). He understands that if Gordie stopped telling stories, he wouldn’t be Gordie. He would have lost something crucial to his well-being and identity.

The Pain of Love and Loss

Gordie loves his friends, and he loves his parents to an extent, but his characterizations of love in The Body often skew towards the negative. When discussing his final conversation with Chris before coming back from Ray’s body, he writes: “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” (165).

In Gordie’s story Stud City, the character Jane tells Chico twice that she loves him. Each time, he avoids saying it back to her. Later, when Gordie writes that Stud City was, in hindsight, an exploration of his own fears, feelings, and hopes, he recognizes his discomfort in Chico’s avoidance of love.

Gordie feels love for Chris as Chris walks away, but he says nothing because “[s]peech destroys the functions of love” (165). Gordie often reiterates that rendering words from feelings cheapens them. For Gordie, love creates a wound, and the wounds can never close. This makes love sound like something that infects a person, not something worth aspiring to.

In The Body, love is a condition that puts people in a vulnerable state. For Gordie, to say I love you is an expression of an uncomfortable truth. His metric for recognizing the truth is unsentimental and even harsh: “You always know the truth, because when you cut yourself or someone else with it, there’s always a bloody show” (41). Gordie can’t extricate the idea of love from the reality of pain and blood.

Gordie loves his friends, but Chris points out that they’ll all drift apart within a couple of years. Although Gordie loves his parents, he sees that they loved Dennis more, which gives him another negative association with love. Also, while Gordie’s parents aren’t cruel to him, they don’t express love for him in any way that he can appreciate.

The clearest distillation of Gordie’s capacity occurs during his most acute moment of grief. As an adult, when he reads that Chris has died, he cries for half an hour. He didn’t grieve even for his brother in the same way he does for Chris, as Dennis was older and they were more acquaintances than siblings. He presents Chris’s death as the greatest loss he ever experienced, and he feels pain because of the love they shared.

Coming of Age and The Loss of Innocence

Early in the story, Gordie says, “I was twelve going on thirteen when I first saw a dead human being” (1). Stephen King’s novels and stories often involve the end of the characters’ innocence. In this early passage, Gordie flags the sight of the dead body as a pivotal moment of transition in his life. Later, he talks about the ritualistic elements of any meaningful transition: “There’s a high ritual to all fundamental events, the rites of passage, the magic corridor where the change happens” (135). The Body is a story that leads toward that change.

The four boys are all from dysfunctional families, but Chris and Teddy deal with vicious abuse from their fathers. Gordie loses his brother, Dennis, experiencing death earlier than he should have. Vern’s brother is cruel to him. The boys all have too much painful experience, too soon. However, they’re still children. When they’re together, they’re free to be immature, lighthearted kids.

The trip to see Ray’s body begins as a thrilling adventure. The closer they get to the body, the more serious the situation becomes. When they find the body, they confront death. Gordie looks at Ray’s corpse and thinks, “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” (158). Children are less likely than adults to think in terms of what’s natural or unnatural. They react with excitement or fear, without abstract notions about natural order. Gordie’s thoughts about the unnatural sight of the body signal the end of his and his friends’ innocence. When Ace and his gang arrive, the threats of violence and the gun introduce a new level of maturity in Gordie and his friends.

By the time they head back to Castle Rock, the story’s tone has changed. The sense of adventure is gone, and the remaining pages have an elegiac feel. When Chris and Gordie say good-bye, Gordie knows that his life has changed. He can never go back to being someone who’s never seen a dead body or return to the time before Vern asked if they wanted to go to see the corpse. Gordie later wonders if their decision to walk down the railroad tracks doomed his friends to early deaths. He must accept that he may never know the truth, another reality more common in adults than children.