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Chapter 20
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 day quickly becomes unmercifully hot, but the boys keep trudging on, drawn to see the dead body. Determined to see the dead body. Gordie thinks they started to feel like they “deserved to see it.” Midmorning, they find a pool behind a beaver dam to the side of the tracks. It’s only temporary, Chris observes; when the railroad company discovers it, they will shoot the beavers and destroy the dam lest the pool flood and undercut the tracks. But right now, it’s a welcome respite from the heat. Chris strips naked and jumps in. Teddy, Vern, and Gordie follow.
Rather than discouraging them, the difficulties and tests the boys face only strengthen their resolve. The tracks carry them inevitably forward, just as time carries all people forward through life toward their own deaths. The cool water of the beaver pool appears just in time to remind them that life doesn’t just involve hardship, either, but that moments of reprieve and enjoyment come just as inevitably as moments of sadness and pain.
Themes
The water is wonderful and refreshing—until the boys realize that they’re covered in leeches. Chris, Gordie, Vern, and Teddy scramble onto the bank and begin flicking leeches off themselves and each other. Unlike the rest, Gordie keeps his cool, until he looks down and sees a giant, rapidly expanding leech stuck to his testicles. He can’t bring himself to touch it, so he asks Chris for help. Chris turns around and throws up into the bushes. Telling himself to “be tough,” Gordie finally picks the leech off. It bursts in his hand, and he bursts into tears. After a while, the boys all calm down and climb back up to the tracks, passing by Gordie’s dead, “deflated…but still ominous” leech.
To prove that life is full of both joy and suffering, the cool water hosts a massive population of leeches. Facing the terror of the bloodsuckers, the boys pass through their fourth test on their quest. This is also the first time any of them have had real skin in the game and all four of them bleed. The book gives particular attention to the reactions of Gordie—who tries to be tough—and Chris, who seems incapable of handling injuries to his friend. These foreshadow their responses later when they discover Ray Brower’s body.
Themes
Years later, on his first trip to New York City, Gordie looks down into the water from the Staten Island Ferry to see dozens of discarded condoms floating in the water, looking for all the world like that leech. He flashes back to the pool. And he realizes that people write stories to help themselves understand the past and accept their mortality.
In a very different way, the memory from New York speaks to life’s crazy mixture of good (the success of his writing career) and bad (the pollution and filth of the world). This is the last major episode before the boys discover the body that’s at the heart of their coming-of-age quest, so it’s a fitting moment for Gordie to remind readers why he’s telling his story.
Themes
