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Chapter 15
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
This chapter is an excerpt from a later version of the story, called “The Revenge of Lard Ass Hogan,” which Gordie published in the 1970s. It picks up the night of the pie-eating contest. Bill Travis (Bill Traynor, in the original version) is the reigning champion. For him, winning is about both pride and money. His boss pays him a bonus for all the extra business his fame brings in. And, because the citizens of Gretna bet heavily on the contest, he wagers on himself, even though by now his victory is such a sure bet that the stakes are low. Everyone considers Lard Ass a promising pie-eater, but still an underdog because he’s so young.
This story takes a county-fair staple, the pie-eating contest, and turns it into a bleak commentary on social division and rot. Winners earn status through their ability to consume like inhuman machines, and their gorging takes place on a public stage for all to appreciate. There’s little kindness in this town, and all of the relationships are transactional: Bill Travis’s pay rests on his performance in the contest. The story presents a world stripped of kindness and cooperation but steeped in competition.
Themes
Bill Travis, Lard Ass, and the rest of the contestants take to the stage under the watchful eye of the mayor. After a brief speech, emcee Sylvia Dodge starts the timer and the eaters—who compete with their hands tied behind their backs—drop their heads into their plates. This year, the pies are blueberry. Lard Ass takes an early and surprising lead. He’s on his third pie before Travis has finished his second. As Lard Ass starts on his fourth pie, the narrator interrupts to tell readers that Lard Ass drank a bottle of castor oil and he's been thinking the most nauseating thoughts he can come up with while he’s been eating. So partway through his fifth pie, the moment of his revenge arrives.
Importantly, the story pits a child against a bunch of more powerful adults. Lard Ass’s plan rests not on beating the adults at their own game but on changing the rules entirely, and this suggests yet again how powerless Gordie and his friends feel in the face of abuse, neglect, and mistreatment from the adults in their lives. And it suggests that they don’t want to play by the same rules but rather make up another game entirely.
Themes
Lard Ass lifts his head, grins at Bill Travis, and projectile vomits in the reigning champion’s face. This sets off a chain reaction, and soon everyone—pie eaters and onlookers alike—is puking all up and down Main Street. Lard Ass looks on the chaos he’s wrought and smiles, his stomach settled and calm now with a feeling of “utter and complete satisfaction.” He stands and approaches the microphone to speak…
The disgusting dénouement of the tale provides most of its appeal to Gordie’s adolescent audience. But there’s an underlying violence to Lard Ass’s revenge, which touches everyone in the community rather than singling out guilty individuals. It suggests that a community is responsible as a whole for how its individual members treat each other. And if that’s the case, then the communities of adults who should be looking out for the Ray Browers or Chris Chamberses or Gordie Lechances of the world deserve worse punishment than this.
Themes
