Previous
Chapter 5
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
Gordie finds his dad watering the clearly dead garden—Mom is out of town with friends—and gets permission for the campout. Dad doesn’t like it that Gordie hangs out with “a thief” (Chris) and “two feebs” (Vern and Teddy). It angers Gordie when people discount Chris because of his family, but he doesn’t say much now lest he antagonize Dad into changing his mind.
The garden emphasizes the neglect Gordie experiences: his dad pays more attention to the lost cause of watering than to his son, just like he and Mom lavish more of their emotional energy on their dead son than their living one. Dad proves Gordie’s allegation from the last chapter (that Chris is doomed because people pay more attention to his family than to him) right, and his anger allows him to show his loyalty to readers.
Themes
Gordie’s dad is 63 and his mom is 55. They doted on Dennis, the child they’d never thought they would be able to have. When Gordie arrived 10 years later, he was a less appreciated surprise. Gordie didn’t know how to describe his childhood until he read Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man—a book about a Black man whom no one notices until he messes up—in high school. Likewise, his parents mostly ignored him in favor of Dennis. They didn’t even notice when he’d test their attention by dropping swear words into his conversation.
Gordie tries to explain why his parents don’t pay attention to him, but this story doesn’t excuse their behavior. The story of his and Dennis’s unlikely births emphasizes the role of fate and makes Dennis’s death seem especially cruel. And by introducing The Invisible Man, Gordie models for his readers how he wants his book to function. By telling his coming-of-age story, he hopes readers will understand their own lives better.
Themes
Gordie had a distant relationship with Dennis. But his memories of Denny taking him along to baseball practice are some of his happiest ones. Sometimes, Denny would tell him scary, exciting bedtime stories, too. Gordie characterizes his feelings for Dennis as a kind of distant, almost religious awe. He was sad when Denny died, even though it didn’t have much of a direct impact on his life.
The switch from the formal Dennis to the much more familiar “Denny” strongly suggests that Gordon wasn’t as distant from his brother as he'd like readers—or himself—to believe. This, and the happy memories, suggest that Gordie is far more affected by the loss than he lets on, but that he’s not yet ready to fully face the implications of Dennis’s death: that everyone, including Gordie himself, is mortal.
Themes
Mom and Dad have left Dennis’s room untouched, like people do in sentimental movies. Gordie hates it, especially when Mom sends him in to fetch something from the closet. He always imagines finding Denny’s dead body in there, moaning “It should have been you, Gordon.”
Leaving Dennis’s room unchanged suggests an unwillingness on Mom’s and Dad’s part to accept their loss. For his part, Gordie feels guilty about his survival. None of the Lechances yet acts as if they have come to terms with their grief.
Themes
Get the entire The Body LitChart as a printable PDF.
