The Long Walk

Emerging as a sidekick in the narrative, Peter McVries frequently takes the lead in his relationship with Garraty. McVries is tall and fit. He has a scar on his cheek, which Garraty finds fascinating until he learns that McVries received it from his ex-girlfriend, Priscilla. He and Priscilla moved to New Jersey together to work in a pajama factory. Priscilla thrived and saved a lot of money; McVries envied her success, which created a wedge in their relationship.

McVries is critical of institutions that control his life, especially the government and capitalism. McVries shares pithy pearls of wisdom and reveals his dissatisfaction with the Walk and its organizers long before Garraty is comfortable voicing his own potential dissidence. When McVries voices his opinions, the other Walkers sometimes distance themselves from him. McVries finds it hard to believe that Garraty didn’t understand the potential of the boys teaming up and rebelling against the soldiers—but McVries didn’t make an effort to start this himself. He doesn’t seem as confident in his ability to win the Walk as Garraty but is motivated by the prospect of beating the cruel boys, especially Barkovitch.

McVries and Garraty’s relationship is one of friendship and some sexual confusion. While much of the novel is clearly dated, reflecting antiquated opinions, its depiction of McVries’s sexuality is surprisingly modern, reflecting a spectrum rather than the typical mid-20th-century binary view of sexuality. McVries’s sexuality is best classified as ambiguous; he could presumably identify as having a bisexual orientation. Several of his comments to Garraty suggest that he’s gay but is uncomfortable with explicitly sharing his sexuality. These comments, which he often tries to play off as jokes, make Garraty uncomfortable because they lead him to question his own sexuality; Garraty is unsure whether he welcomes McVries’s advances (as when McVries tells Garraty that he has a crush on him).

McVries and Garraty save each other several times, and each feels indebted to the other by the end of the Walk. McVries ultimately gets “third place,” dying before Stebbins. His death signals a kind of death for Garraty too; in McVries, Garraty found a friend with whom he could be honest and, in a different setting, might have explored and interrogated his own sexuality. McVries acts as both Garraty’s sidekick and foil, enhancing and supplementing his existing convictions while allowing him space to reflect and determine what constitutes his “opposite.”

Emerging as an antagonist, Stebbins evolves from a mysterious loner to a deadly competitor. The narrative never reveals his first name. He’s 17 years old, has blue eyes and blond hair, and is recognizable by his chambray shirt and purple pants. Stebbins is sarcastic and mocking, and he prefers to speak in cryptic, roundabout ways or in riddles rather than directly saying what he means. Many of the other boys find this frustrating. Garraty considers it mysterious and entertaining. Because Stebbins tends to dress up the truth, no one’s sure whether he’s completely honest about his parentage; at the beginning of the Walk, he mentions that his father is in the Squads and got him front-row seats to a previous Walk. Toward the end of the Walk, however, when the survivors are delirious with exhaustion, Stebbins claims that the Major is his father and that he’d hoped winning the Walk would guarantee him treatment as a legitimate child. Stebbins drops hints about hoping that the Walk can be won through multiple means and clearly fears that his faith in nepotism, especially illegitimate nepotism, will fail him.

Among the other boys, Stebbins is more comfortable as a loner than being part of the group. The narrative describes him in animalistic terms that emphasize his separation from the others; like a “flea,” he feeds off the larger group without belonging to it. He stays separate and doesn’t try to ingratiate himself to anyone. He hovers and follows, observing the benefits of the all-boys social community without allowing himself to be a part of it. His attitude toward the other boys reveals hints of envy, and Stebbins becomes a kind of spectator himself.

Stebbins acts as somewhat of a foil to Garraty; Garraty tends to speak honestly and without avarice or mischief, while both McVries and Stebbins speak in metaphors that confuse Garraty. Stebbins’s tendency to speak cryptically might stem from a need for self-preservation and a fear that open, honest communication could result in his punishment or ostracism. As a child of the Major (if one interprets his last claim of parentage as honest), it would make sense that his perception of social bonds and truthfulness are affected by his father’s harsh worldview. If the Major’s microcosmic family represents the same kind of harsh boundaries as the macrocosmic society that he has created, it would follow that Stebbins’s fear of freedom of speech and speaking one’s truth have been altered and traumatized by the knowledge of his father’s potential for punishment.