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Chapter 27
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
After 20 minutes, Chris rejoins Teddy, Vern, and Gordie. Although Teddy still wants to take the body back, Chris now agrees with Gordie. They can’t. The boys agree on a new cover story. Gordie carefully retrieves the casings from the bullets Chris shot—just in case—and the boys start trotting back along the tracks toward Castle Rock.
Chris faces the difficult truth alone, then rejoins his friends. Subdued—this adventure has not turned out at all as they expected—the boys prepare for the long walk home. They have all been changed and they know it, even if they cannot articulate the ways yet.
Themes
No one talks. Gordie is too busy thinking about what they found. A lot of it bothers him. Ray Brower’s visible injuries don’t look severe enough to have come from the train—and wouldn’t the engineer have seen the body and reported it? What’s more, they never found the pot Ray allegedly took for berry-picking. Years later, that missing pot still rankles Gordie. As an adult he fantasizes about finding it and bringing it home as irrevocable proof of his own experiences, and his own survival.
On the one hand, Gordie’s sense of confusion reflects his confrontation with death. It doesn’t look like he expected it to, and it’s terrifying to consider that death doesn’t always announce itself clearly, leaving a person time to prepare. On the other, his obsession with the berry pot hints that he doesn’t fully believe the story he’s been told, especially after seeing the body. Ray Brower doesn’t look like he was killed by a train, and it’s not outside the realm of Gordie’s experience to imagine that he was killed by a person. After all, Chris’s and Teddy’s experiences testify that adults can and sometimes do harm children in horrific ways. And the boys took Ace’s threats of violence entirely seriously when he made them.
Themes
