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Chapter 31
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
Near the end of September, Ace Merrill and Fuzzy Bracowicz beat Gordie to a bloody pulp in full sight of his neighbor Mrs. Chalmers. Gordie fights back, biting Fuzzy’s ankle through his blue jeans, but he still comes home with bruised testicles, a black eye, broken fingers, and a broken nose. Mrs. Chalmers helps him up and he limps home. Mom and Dad take him immediately to the doctor, but don’t press when he refuses to name his attackers.
Mrs. Chalmers’s refusal to actually call the police, even though she threatens to, reinforces Gordie’s sense that adults are never going to protect him or anyone else. This underwrites his unwillingness to say who beat him up, since he doesn’t trust that anything will happen. After all, everyone knows Mr. Chambers beats Chris, including the police, but they do nothing.
Themes
Eyeball beats Chris so severely he breaks his arm in two places. At the hospital, Chris claims that he fell down the dark basement stairs, then he makes sure that his mother unscrews the lightbulb so that his story will check out. Billy beats Vern over the head with a pipe, stopping as soon as Vern loses consciousness. Teddy suffers a few blows and broken glasses. Their injuries earn their peers’ respect. Vern and Teddy parlay this fame into a new gang, and they eventually drift out of Gordie’s life.
Chris’s ongoing abuse confirms Gordie’s distrust of the adults and authorities around him. He shows the degree to which society fails people like Chris when he describes in painful detail how hard Chris works to keep his brother out of jail. The lumps the four boys take earn their peers’ respect and they visually demonstrate that they’ve grown up over the summer—on account of their quest to find Ray Brower’s body.
Themes
