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Chapter 1
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
Gordie and his gang have a treehouse that they built in an elm tree over a vacant lot. They scavenged the materials from the dump and the scrap pile behind the lumber shop, and they’ve filled the space with playing cards (they play blackjack and other games for penny bets), detective story magazines, “girlie books,” and cigarettes. When necessary, they hide their contraband under a secret trap in the floor. But by the time Gordie is an adult, the treehouse is gone.
Gordie describes the treehouse in loving detail. It’s clear that this place—and the people he shared it with, his friends—meant a lot to him. But despite all the effort that went into building it, the treehouse isn’t there anymore. Likewise, the friendships Gordie had in his childhood haven’t proved permanent.
Themes
On this Friday morning, near the end of the hottest and driest since 1907, Gordie, Teddy, and Chris are in the treehouse playing cards. Teddy Duchamp’s thick glasses and double hearing aids make him look like an old man. His eyes are bad naturally, but his father, Norman—a disturbed veteran of World War II—burned both his ears on a woodstove as punishment for breaking a plate one day when Teddy was eight. Now Norman is in psychiatric care at the VA hospital, but Teddy still loves and respects him. Teddy is dumb and crazy, willing to do anything on a dare and known for playing chicken with trucks on the interstate.
The first adult introduced in the book—and the only parent to be named by Gordie—Norman typifies the book’s distrustful attitude toward grownups. They can’t be trusted: at best, they’re neglectful, and at worst, they’re actively abusive. But Norman is the victim of his own circumstances, too, traumatized by his combat experience during World War II. Teddy’s dangerous games suggests that he’s already lost some of his innocence, but that he doesn’t yet truly understand death.
Themes
The card game is breaking up when Vern Tessio, another regular, hustles up the ladder to see who can plan to camp out in his backyard that night. Gordie knows his parents won’t care. They’ve barely paid attention to him since the death of his older brother, Dennis, who died in a car accident during Basic Training the previous spring. Teddy asks why Vern’s so excited, and Vern says he wants them to go with him to see a dead body.
If Norman represents one end of the spectrum of terrible parenting, Gordie’s parents represent the other. And while they pose less of a danger to their son, their neglect is no less hurtful. Dennis’s death hints at the role fate plays in any life. Basic Training should be safer than combat duty, but he died, nevertheless.
Themes
