The Body

Right before they find Ray’s body, Teddy asks himself, “What am I doin’ here, anyway?” (139). He is asking why he’s on a trip to see a body and sitting next to a train rail in a lightning storm, but his question has an existential component that applies to all of them: What purpose do their lives have? What is meaningful to them, and is it reflected in the choices they make? This question returns when an adult Gordie 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).

Although Stephen King is best known as a horror writer, The Body is not a horror story. It does have horrific elements, however. For instance, the leeches would be effective in anyone’s nightmare. Gordie’s dreams about Dennis returning from the grave are frightening. Ray’s body is covered in ants, and the rain makes unsettling noises as it hits his dead face. However, in amid of all these frightening moments, Gordie’s realization that Ray’s death is unnatural is what gives the story its most vital jolt of horror: “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). The horrific in life and in literature is always about something unnatural. Gordie can’t escape the idea that they came all this way to experience something unnatural. Now that he sees it, he rejects it as existing outside of anything but horror.

As an adult, Gordie remembers the moment he saw the body. He identifies it as the moment when he realized that kids could die like anyone else. Gordie experiences a metaphorical death at the same time: “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?” (161). Ray’s body represents the death of their innocence as well as their own impending mortality.

After the confrontation with Ace’s gang, Gordie moves briskly through their return to Castle Rock. The theme for the rest of the story is survival, both literal and metaphorical. When Gordie writes about his relationship with Chris and the effort he put into studying with him, he says:

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 (176).

Gordie also understands that his own survival was never guaranteed: “Some people drown, that’s all. It’s not fair, but it happens. Some people drown” (173). As long as they’re together, Chris and Gordie encourage each other, help each other, and manage to leave Castle Rock for college.

As an adult, Gordie spends a lot of time trying to make sense of why he and Chris meant so much to each other, but he always feels as if words are inadequate. He can tell Chris he loves him, but at the same time, Gordie writes: “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” (165).

The story’s final chapters return to the confessional tone at its beginning. Gordie—now Gordon, as an adult—is a wealthy, successful writer. He admits that he’s occasionally insecure about his work, which he views as a slightly elevated form of childish make-believe. When he shares the details of Teddy and Vern’s deaths, it’s relatively unsentimental. However, when he learns that Chris died of the stab wound, he cries for half an hour and can’t tell anyone. Despite his ability to share his life in writing, he’s still failed to convey the depths of his emotions for Chris with words. The grief transcended speech and stories, although stories are Gordie’s primary tool for processing his experience.  

The story concludes with Gordie seeing Ace again after many years. Like Chopper, the dog at the dump, the reality of Ace Merrill no longer lives up to its reputation. He never left Castle Rock, he works long hours at the mill, and he’s an alcoholic. Ace became what Chris had feared would happen to himself if he stayed in Castle Rock. Even though Chris died young, he didn’t die as young as Ray Bowers, and he chose a different path for himself than his family did. Gordie helped Chris break the cycle of his family’s reputation. However, Gordie still feels the pain. As he writes in Chapter 29, “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). Gordie doesn’t pretend that he’s forgotten his friends or their deaths. Rather, the pain of their lost bond is always with him, and he continues to process it the only way he knows how: through stories.