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Chapter 2
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
They all know Vern means Ray Brower, a boy about their age who went missing three days earlier from a town about 40 miles away. When massive search parties failed to find him, everybody assumed he had died. In 1960, it was still possible to wander into the southern Maine woods, get lost, and die of exposure. By the 1980s (when Gordie is telling his story), a person can’t go for five miles without tripping over a house or a road.
It’s telling that despite the clear possibility of danger, none of the boys’ parents worry about their children running around with minimal supervision. And it’s hard to tell if Gordie thinks it’s good or bad that his children live in a safer (if less wild) world than he grew up in. In any case, Ray Brower’s disappearance and death forces the boys to think about their own mortality, because Ray is so much like them.
Themes
