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Chapter 11
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Body, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Loss of Innocence
Fate, Luck, and Chance
Confronting Mortality
The Power and Limitation of Friendship
Making Meaning through Stories
Summary
Analysis
Even decades later, in the 1980s, walking to the Florida Market on that sweltering day remains Gordie’s defining image of the summer of 1960. Nothing else—not the songs on the radio or the movies at the theater or listening to a baseball game—captures the feeling of being 12 like running down the road with $2.37 jingling in his pocket.
The long list of things Gordie details about the summer are at once specific—they are the things that mattered to him—and generic. Everybody heard the same songs on the radio, could look up the baseball stats, and saw the same movies. The list thus suggests that while the story is Gordie’s own, it unveils universal truths.
Themes
The store owner, George Dusset, recognizes Gordie as Dennis’s brother. He offers Gordie his condolences. Gordie notices that George Dusset has his finger on the scale, cheating the boy of his money’s worth of meat. Then, Dusset tries to overcharge Gordie for the groceries. Gordie points both events out, and they argue. Dusset gets so mad that Gordie expects him to chase him down the road. But he doesn’t.
The way that Gordie’s existence is locked with his brother’s offers him continual if subliminal reminders of his own mortality. If special, appreciated, beloved Dennis could die, the same goes double for underappreciated and ignored Gordie. And Gordie’s experience at the Florida Market underscores the book’s claim that adults aren’t trustworthy. The kids can only rely on each other.
Themes
Gordie climbs over the dump gate and is halfway to the back fence before he sees Milo Pressman’s car. He has almost made it back to his friends when Milo sees him. When Gordie breaks into a run, Milo sics Chopper on him. Gordie scrambles over the fence then turns to see that Chopper is just a regular mongrel. Safely separated by the fence, Teddy mocks Chopper. Milo admonishes the boys to stop, getting really angry when Teddy taunts Chopper into running full tilt at the fence and knocking himself silly. Milo names each of the boys and threatens to tell their parents, except for Teddy’s “loony” father Norman. This sends Teddy over the edge, and he hurls increasingly unhinged insults at Milo until Vern, Chris, and Gordie pull him away.
The encounter with Chopper is the friends’ first test on their quest. Predictably, Teddy doesn’t take it very seriously; it’s easy to taunt the dog from the safe side of the fence. Unlike Gordie, he hasn’t just faced real danger. Ultimately, this suggests, he won’t: his games of chicken aren’t really brave. They’re foolish and dangerous. It’s possible that he's more like his mentally unstable father than he would like to admit. Milo’s taunts also crack through some of Teddy’s childlike innocence, because they force him to consider, for the first time, that his dad might not be the hero he wants to believe in.
Themes
