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Chapter 17
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
The gang decides to stop and make camp before nightfall, because none of them are eager to sleep too close to the body (and potential ghost) of Ray Brower. Vern, Chris, and Teddy gather fuel for a fire and argue about how best to start it while Gordie molds lumps of hamburger around greenwood sticks to make what Denny used to call “Pioneer Drumsticks.” After dinner, Chris solemnly hands each boy a cigarette pilfered from his dad’s dresser, and they smoke, feeling very mature and worldly.
With their post-dinner cigarettes, the boys pretend to be adults. But their fear of the ghost belies this show. They’re still children in many important ways. Denny’s ghostly presence in the “Pioneer Drumsticks” subtly reminds readers why: the boys have yet to confront the evidence of their own mortality. Death still isn’t real, it’s just fuel for campfire stories about ghosts.
Themes
In the growing gloom of twilight, Gordie, Vern, Teddy, and Chris tramp down a flat space to lay out their bedrolls. They talk about kid stuff, but Gordie can’t stop thinking about Ray Brower. He feels sad for the boy, whose body lies somewhere in the woods, exposed, unprotected by his mother or father or anyone else. To distract himself, he tells everyone a Le Dio story that ends, like most of them, with the emotionally overwrought dying words of a patriotic American soldier. In his imagination, he hears the words coming from the mouth of a boy lying by train tracks in the Maine woods, not a soldier in France.
Remember that although the boys are still certainly boys, they’ve also left behind their civilization and the town of their childhoods to strike off on this adventure, and they’ve already undergone two tests of their resolve (the dump, the trestle). They’re not quite the same as they were when they left. That’s why Gordie spends an increasing amount of time thinking not about Ray Brower as a body but as a person. Ray is becoming real to Gordie, and as he comes into focus, so do the similarities between himself and the dead boy. He tries to push this uncomfortable knowledge away with a distracting story. But it doesn’t work.
Themes
