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Chapter 23
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
From his vantage point in the 1980s, Gordie notices that no one ever questioned the idea of following the tracks when it would have been faster and simpler to hitchhike into Harlow. He wonders if doing that would have changed things for Chris, Teddy, and Vern, all of whom have died in the intervening 20-odd years. He was the only one who escaped the goocher coin toss, and he’s the only one still alive.
The boys are approaching the turning point of their story as they get closer and closer to their goal. At this hinge in the narrative, adult Gordie breaks in. His reflections show readers some of the lessons he hopes they might get from his story, one of which is the power of fate and chance to redirect lives.
Themes
But Gordie knows no one would have agreed to hitchhike, even if none of them could have said why at the time. From his adult vantage point, he knows that they intuitively understood that their adventure was the kind of “big thing” that changes a person. A rite of passage. Rites of passage have their own ritual demands, and the tracks became the “magic corridor” down which Gordie, Vern, Teddy, and Chris walked toward their first encounter with death.
Only retrospectively can Gordie understand the adventure as a coming-of-age quest or rite of passage, and from that standpoint he explains some of the symbolism of following the tracks. Still, he maintains, he and his friends subconsciously intuited the fact that they were doing something deeper than just looking at the gross spectacle of a dead body.
Themes
Another thing Gordie, Vern, Chris, and Teddy don’t know that afternoon is that Billy and Charlie Hogan told the rest of their gang about the body. And by early Saturday afternoon, they were all on their way out to Back Harlow Road to “discover” it too.
Up to this point, Gordie has been readers’ sole source of information. If he didn’t see it or hear about it, they haven’t heard about it. Adult Gordie also uses a bit of writerly technique to ratchet up the tension here by hinting that a confrontation awaits the boys. Additionally, Billy’s and Charlie’s choice to speak is something none of the boys could have predicted—like all the other things that happen by chance in life.
Themes
