SOURCE: "The Mythic Journey in The Body'," in The Dark Descent: Essays Defining Stephen King's Horrorscope, edited by Tony Magistrale, Greenwood Press, 1992, pp. 83-97.

[Biddle is an American educator and critic. In the following essay, he examines The Body as a narrative that follows the traditional pattern of the "mythic journey."]

There's a high ritual to all fundamental events, the rites of passage, the magic corridor where the change happens. [King, The Body]

"The magic corridor where the change happens" is the special territory of Stephen King. This zone of extraordinary power takes many shapes. In It Ben Hanscom maintains a connection to his own adolescent past by returning again and again in memory to the glassed-in corridor that connects the children's wing to the adult section of his hometown library. Finally, at the end of the novel, this conduit is fully realized when Ben and the Losers' Club merge past and present in their return to Derry. In The Talisman the Oatley Tunnel is the symbolic passageway for Jack Sawyer from the protected world of his mother to the depraved town of Oatley. In The Body the "magic corridor" for Gordie Lachance and his friends is the railroad tracks they follow in their search for the dead Ray Brower.

The fundamental event in The Body is the coming into identity of the young hero, Gordon Lachance. From Friday afternoon until Sunday morning at the end of August 1960, Gordie undergoes a series of trials that bring him to selfhood, to identity both as a young man and as a writer. The narrative pattern that King employs is the archetypal rite of passage that marks the transition from one life stage to another.

In a recent interview, Stephen King acknowledged the influence on his work of mythologist Joseph Campbell: "I was particularly taken by the book The Hero with a Thousand Faces" [Magistrale, Stephen King, 1992]. That influence shapes the structure and major themes of King's tale of the journey of four boys on the brink of adolescence. Their adventure, especially that of the central hero Gordie, recapitulates the timeless rites of passage that order human experience. In his The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell summarizes the pattern:

The standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification of the formula represented in the rites of passage: separation—initiation—return: which might be named the nuclear monomyth. A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.

The modern reader has become accustomed to viewing the journeys of Jason or Ulysses [both Homer's and Joyce's versions] or even Jesus in these terms. But it may seem a bit pretentious to apply the mythic pattern to the experiences of four twelve-year-olds in the Maine of 1960. Critic Northrop Frye recognizes the modern author's difficulty in incorporating "a mythical structure into realistic fiction." The solution is what Frye calls "displacement," essentially deemphasizing and disguising the mythic elements in order to achieve plausibility. King accomplishes this displacement with great skill: the story of The Body works for the contemporary reader as a nice bit of adventure that seldom strains credulity. Yet, the underlying structure is clearly that of Campbell's monomyth: "a separation from the world, a penetration to some source of power, and a life-enhancing return."

The "kingdom" of Castle Rock is a drought-stricken, heat-beaten wasteland. The soil is barren; no garden has produced a crop in this the driest and hottest summer since 1907. The metaphoric ruler of this land—King of Castle Rock—is Gordie's father, a figure of abject futility as he stands amidst the dust of his ruined garden, "making useless rainbows in the air" with his watering hose. He looks "sad and tired and used. He was sixty-three years old, old enough to be my grandfather," Gordie observes. His powers have deserted him, and as a result his entire realm suffers a corresponding loss of vitality. The older Lachance is a modern version of an ancient figure—the Fisher King. Jessie L. Weston remarks, "the intimate relation at one time was held to exist between the ruler and his land; a relation mainly dependent upon the identification of the [Fisher] King with the Divine principle of Life and Fertility" [From Ritual to Romance, 1957]. Mr. Lachance and Castle Rock are in death's grip.

Reinforcing this theme of sterility in the Kingdom is Gordie's mother, who has suffered alternating periods of fertility and barrenness. After three miscarriages she was told she would never have a child; five years later she became pregnant with Dennis. Ten years after that at age fortytwo she conceived Gordie, whose birth is unusual: "the doctor had to use forceps to yank me out." His parents have told him this story many times: "They wanted me to think I was a special delivery from God."

Special delivery from God or not, Gordie was always ignored in favor of his older, more talented brother Dennis. When Denny was alive, Gordie felt like Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man: "Nobody ever notices him at all unless he fucks up. People look right through him." With Denny's death in a jeep accident, his parents behave as if they have nothing to live for. The senior Lachance is a king without an heir: "He'd lost a son in April and a garden in August." When his father notices Gordie at all, it is only to attack his friends as "a thief and two feebs," and by implication to put Gordie into the category of social misfit. Gordie accounts for his mother's distracted behavior by flatly pointing out that "her only kid was dead." He sees himself as the true target of the ultimate putdown, "Did your mother ever have any kids that lived?"

One result of this treatment at the hands of his parents is his fear of his brother's ghost, which he is sure lurks in Denny's closet. In his dreams Denny's battered and bloody corpse emerges from his closet and confronts him: "It should have been you, Gordon. It should have been you." These dreams are the product of the guilt Gordie feels for being alive. Subconsciously he feels that his survival somehow makes him responsible for Denny's death as well as for his parents' grief. Gordie dreads that "it" might yet become him, accounting in part for the power that Vern's tale of the discovery of Ray Brower's body exerts over him. These fears move out of his dreams and into his writing—"Stud City," "The Revenge of Lard Ass Hogan," and the Le Dio stories—a literature of guilt and death.

Joseph Campbell provides some insight into the role Gordie is to play in the ensuing adventure. The hero of the monomyth "and/or the world in which he finds himself suffers from a symbolical deficiency" (Campbell). In The Body that deficiency is two-fold: both personal and societal. Gordie experiences a grave crisis of identity, not so much an uncertainty about who he is, but that he is. If no one acknowledges your presence, do you really exist? Gordie's very being is called into question. Thus as soon as Vern tells about his brother's discovery of the body, Gordie empathizes with the dead boy: "I felt a little sick, imagining that kid so far away from home, scared to death." His ego is so undeveloped that he needs to view the body of young Ray Brower to be sure it is not he himself who has died. He also needs to acknowledge the existence of death in life, something he was unable to do at Denny's funeral. Ray Brower's body offers a concretization of Gordie's many fears. Only through this quest can Gordie begin to deal with the shadow that hangs over all our lives.

The second symbolical deficiency inheres in the world in which he lives, a parched and infertile wasteland, like the land of the Fisher King. On the surface, the sterility of Castle Rock is a result of the prolonged drought and extraordinary heat of the summer of 1960. But at a deeper level, it is the aridity of a community that cannot love. Castle Rock is a place where parents maim their children by burning their ears, bruising their faces, or destroying their spirits. Where teachers steal and shift the blame to their students by lying. Where shopkeepers cheat their innocent customers. And where public employees train their dogs to attack children. The destructive machine appetites of Castle Rock are shown throughout the book—from Milo's junkyard of American waste to the pollution of the Castle River to the life-threatening train itself bearing down on the boys from the direction of the town. The true purpose of Gordie's journey, then, is to remedy these two deficiencies of self-identity and sterility of the kingdom, although he is aware of only the first and that but inchoately.

Twelve-year-old Gordon Lachance is, admittedly, an unlikely candidate for hero. But that shouldn't be a total surprise. The archetypal hero of the monomyth always fulfills a pattern according to the nature and the requirements of the particular narrative. Campbell describes two variations on the type of the hero and the fruit of his adventure:

Typically the hero of the fairy tale achieves a domestic, microcosmic triumph, and the hero of myth a world-historical, macrocosmic triumph. Whereas the former—the youngest or despised child who becomes the master of extraordinary powers—prevails over his personal oppressors, the latter brings back from his adventure the means for the regeneration of his society as a whole.

Like the hero of the fairy tale, Gordie is the youngest and the despised child who confronts a variety of personal oppressors: his parents, the storekeeper, the dumpkeeper and his dog, the older boys. Only by mastering these trials will Gordie be able to achieve identity. But as the son of the King, he is also called upon to redeem the realm; through his tests he will develop the extraordinary powers required to regenerate his society. By tracing the course of his quest, we may come to understand the achievement of these prizes.

"You guys want to go see a dead body?" Vern Tessio sounds the call to adventure by bringing news of the discovery of the body of a boy missing for three days. By announcing the challenge to find the dead Ray Brower, twelve-year-old Vern acts as herald who calls the hero to the adventure. Chris Chambers supports the call and embellishes it: "We can find the body and report it! We'll be on the news!" Gordie's three friends—Chris Chambers, Vern Tessio, and Teddy Duchamp—have also been scarred by the adult world and denied its love. The boys see this as an opportunity to achieve attention and perhaps even affection.

Campbell explains that the call "signifies that destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual center of gravity from within the pale of his society to a zone unknown." As we shall see, Gordie is challenged to an adventure which promises a spiritual transformation through a dying and a re-birth. Jungian analyst Erich Neumann supports the psychological import of this type of archetypal experience: "The dragon fight of the first period [onset of puberty] begins with the encounter with the unconscious and ends with the heroic birth of the ego." In accepting the call, Gordie (accompanied by Chris, Vern, and Teddy) enters on a quest that, unlike their existence in Castle Rock, is life-confirming and morally unambiguous. "We knew exactly who we were and exactly where we were going."

Although their preparations are scant (mainly concocting stories to cover their absence), they sense intuitively the significance of the journey ahead. It is high noon when they set off. The older Gordie, sitting at his computer twenty years later, reflects: "I'll never forget that moment, no matter how old I get."

Leaving behind the security of home, the boys walk through the afternoon heat until they come to the dump, that repository of "all the American things that get empty, wear out, or just don't work any more." Situated on the edge of town and populated by a vaguely demonic assortment of rats, woodchucks, seagulls, and stray dogs, it marks the limits of their known world. The dump functions as what Campbell calls the threshold, representing "regions of the unknown" that are "free fields for the projection of unconscious content." Poised on the brink of puberty, the boys have outgrown their old haunts and pastimes. To develop, they must move forward. But first they must penetrate the threshold to the source of power.

Barring the way are the threshold guardians, Milo Pressman, the dumpkeeper, and his dog, Chopper. Campbell points out that the watchman functions as the guardian of established bounds of consciousness: "And yet—it is only by advancing beyond those bounds, provoking the destructive other aspects of the same power, that the individual passes, either alive or in death, into a new zone of experience." Reminiscent of Cerberus, the three-headed watchdog of the underworld encountered by Aeneas, Chopper is "the most feared and least seen dog in Castle Rock." Legends abound. Chopper, it was said, had been trained not only to attack, but to attack specific parts of the body on command from Milo. The command every boy dreaded to hear was "Chopper! Sic! Balls!"

As in the subsequent episode with the leeches, the boy's paramount fear is emasculation. The pubescent boy, unconfirmed in his sexuality, is sensitive to every threat, real or imagined. Their town and families have symbolically emasculated them. And the boys' frequent teasing about being a "pussy" or being "queer" and the boasting of penile size impress the centrality of this concern to all of them. Gordie doesn't even see Chopper as he races for the fence and safety, but he feels him gaining. Like Cerberus, that other threshold guardian, Chopper is perceived as a hound from Hell: "shaking the earth, blurting fire out of one distended nostril and ice out of the other, dripping sulphur from his jaws." It is only when Gordie has scaled the fence and looks back through its mesh from a place of safety that he actually sees that Chopper is a rather ordinary mongrel of medium size: "My first lesson in the vast difference between myth and reality." Paradoxically, though, King's narrative (as well as Jung's and Campbell's world views) shows that myth and reality are not poles apart. Indeed reality recapitulates myth. So that even though Chopper may not be truly a hound of Hell, he fulfills the function of threshold guardian perfectly well. And as both the reader and Gordie will soon discover, the journey to see the body emphasizes the similarities, rather than the differences, "between myth and reality."

Gordie's experience at the dump allows him passage beyond the realm of ordinary existence in Castle Rock, through trial, to new possibilities. With his friends he leaves the dump/threshold much as Ulysses departed from the Cyclops, hurling imprecations. The threshold gained, the adventurers move into unfamiliar territory and new tests of their will.

Gordie and his friends have now completed the first phase of the rite of passage: separation from the known world. As they seek to penetrate to a source of power thus far denied them, they, and especially Gordie, will have to pass even more severe tests. Although Gordie is accompanied by three friends, they play distinctly supporting roles as far as the mythic quest is concerned. They are reminiscent of J. R. R. Tolkien's merry band of Hobbits who support Frodo on his adventures in Middle Earth. Chris Chambers, of course, does stand out as Gordie's special friend and guide, more like Tolkien's Sam or Dante's Virgil than Don Quixote's Sancho Panza. (Their relationship and the special kind of love they share is too rich a theme to explore here.) But though Chris and the others participate in the communal tests, only Gordie is tested alone. He is the singular hero challenged to relieve the symbolical deficiencies of self and society through an act of initiation.

The mature narrator characterizes the rites of passage as "the magic corridor where change happens." "Our corridor," he continues, "was those twin rails, and we walked between them, just hopping along toward whatever this was supposed to mean." Those twin rails pose a more-than-symbolic threat, though, when the boys must cross a railroad trestle over the Castle River. Its height—fifty feet above the river—is dizzying. Its length—well over a hundred yards—is terrifying because the time of the next train remains unknown. The will to face the danger is perceived as a test of masculinity: "Any pussies here?" Chris asks. Gordie accepts the dare "and as I said it some guy pole-vaulted in my stomach. He dug his pole all the way into my balls, it felt like, and ended up sitting astride my heart." To Gordie, the fear of death is perceived largely as a sexual threat. Chris and Teddy lead the way, followed by Vern and then Gordie far behind.

Gordie is halfway across when he has to stop to calm his jitters and overcome his dizziness: "that was when I had my first and last psychic flash." He realizes that the train is coming and that he will surely be killed if he is caught on the trestle. Fear grips him, he urinates involuntarily, time stops. Transcendent terror causes mind and body to disconnect. He is unable to move. "An image of Ray Brower, dreadfully mangled and thrown into a ditch somewhere like a ripped-open laundry bag, reeled before my eyes." The gut-wrenching fear that Gordie felt when he first heard of the boy's death was premonitory. In his mind's eye he is reliving Ray Brower's fate, he is becoming Ray Brower. That thought breaks the spell, freeing Gordie to rise from the railbed like "a boy in underwater slow motion."

Gordie never saw the train, just as he never saw Chopper during his pursuit. The train, Chopper, the mills of Castle Rock, the fate that took Dennis away—all seem larger than life, like Ace and his gang of bigger boys. One purpose of Gordie's journey is to humanize these mythic enemies by obtaining control over them.

When the four find a cool, shady spot where they can rest and recover, Gordie admits his fear, "I was fuckin petrified." But in facing that fear Gordie gains a new-found strength. "My body felt warm, exercised, at peace with itself. Nothing in it was working crossgrain to anything else. I was alive and glad to be." Through his brush with death he has discovered a new sense of wholeness and well-being. Twice he has been pursued, once by a creature of nature, Chopper, and once by a creature of technology, the train. Twice he has confronted the worst fears of his subconscious and the threat to his emerging ego and survived. In the next test he is actually touched by death.

The group walk only a mile beyond the trestle before making camp for the night. After an improvised supper and a manly cigaret, they lie in their bedrolls talking about things twelve-year-olds talk about: cars, baseball, teachers. Gordie thinks about how different nightfall is in the woods with no lights and "no mothers' voices" calling their children to the safety of home. Teddy tells about witnessing a near-drowning at White's Beach. What they don't talk about is Ray Brower, but Gordie thinks about him, "so alone and defenseless. . . . If something wanted to eat on him, it would. His mother wasn't there to stop that from happening." A necessity of every boy's journey to adulthood is leaving forever the comforting bosom of the mother. Gordie feels the pain of that separation and the danger to which it exposes him; he does not yet understand the potential gains of the break: freedom and power.

When Gordie finally falls asleep, he has the first of two swimming dreams: he and Denny are bodysurfing at Harrison State Park. The dream is interrupted as he awakens, confused and disoriented, unsure of where he is or what woke him. Then he hears a drawn-out unearthly scream. Everyone is awake now and speculating on the source: a bird? a wildcat? Ray's ghost?

Again Gordie dreams of swimming, this time with Chris at White's Beach, the scene of the near-drowning Teddy had told of earlier in the evening. As the boys swim out over their heads, one of their teachers floats over on an inflatable raft and orders Chris to give Robert Frost's "Mending Wall" by rote. In despair he begins to recite, then his head goes under water. He rises again, pleads with Gordie to help him, and sinks beneath the surface once more.

Looking into the clear water I could see two bloated, naked corpses holding his ankles. One was Vern and the other was Teddy, and their open eyes were as blank and pupilless as the eyes of Greek statues. Their small pre-pubescent penises floated limply up from their distended bellies like albino strands of kelp. Chris's head broke water again. He held one hand up limply to me and voiced a screaming, womanish cry that rose and rose, ululating in the hot summer air. I looked wildly toward the beach but nobody had heard. The lifeguard . . . just went on smiling down at a girl in a red bathing suit.

As Chris is dragged under a last time, his eyes and hands implore Gordie's help. "But instead of diving down and trying to save him, I stroked madly for the shore." Before he can reach safety, though, he feels the grip of "a soft, rotted, implacable hand" pulling him down. The dream ends when he is shaken into wakefulness by Teddy's grip on his leg.

Every element of this dream either derives from Gordie's recent experiences and present fears or presages events yet to come. The dream again links Gordie with Ray Brower, the child as helpless victim cornered by forces larger than himself. The corpses of Vern and Teddy grow from Chris's earlier observation that "your friends drag you down. . . . They're like drowning guys that are holding onto your legs. You can't save them. You can only drown with them." Their small limp penises reflect both their physical immaturity and Gordie's fears about his sexual adequacy. Their corpses also foreshadow their deaths at an early age, although Gordie couldn't have foreseen that. And Chris will be murdered when he is only twenty-four years old. His imploring figure reflects his reliance on Gordie, as an understanding friend in the present and as a mentor in the college prep courses in high school. His thin womanish scream is the unexplained cry they heard earlier in the night. Fearful for his own life, Gordie does not dive down to save Chris. Instead, he looks to the adult world on the beach for help. In the person of the lifeguard charged with protecting swimmers, that world ignores Gordie's pleas, just as the adult world of Castle Rock has failed to heed the cries of its children. As Gordie himself is being dragged under water by "a soft, rotted, implacable hand," he is awakened by Teddy; it is time to stand his tour of guard duty.

This dream represents the first stage of Gordie's night sea journey, an archetypal pattern symbolic of rebirth. Briefly, the archetype as employed by Virgil, Dante, and the author of the Book of Jonah among others, sees the hero making a perilous journey, usually by night, into the depths of the sea or a dark cavern. He may be swallowed by a sea monster. Joseph Campbell characterizes the hero's perilous journey as a descent "into the crooked lanes of his own spiritual labyrinth." Entering a cavern, the belly of a whale, or the depths of the sea, the hero leaves behind the upper world of light and life to confront his own death. Jungian analyst Erich Neumann explains that puberty is a time

of rebirth, and its symbolism is that of the hero who regenerates himself through fighting the dragon. All the rites characteristic of this period have the purpose of renewing the personality through a night sea journey, when the spiritual or conscious principle conquers the mother dragon, and the tie to the mother and to childhood, and also to the unconscious, is severed.

The second part of the archetypal pattern, the dragon fight, will take place the next day.

During the rest of the night Gordie passes in and out of consciousness. Finally, he awakens from a light sleep to discover that dawn has broken. He is savoring his solitude when he notices a deer standing less than thirty feet away, looking at him. The impact of the sight nearly overwhelms him: "My heart went up into my throat. . . . I couldn't have moved if I had wanted to." When he perceives the deer to be looking at him "serenely," Gordie projects into her being, "seeing a kid with his hair in a sleep-scarecrow of whirls and many-tined cowlicks." It is as if "he" (some part of him) has moved out of his body and looks at that twelve-year-old standing there. The doe emphasizes her trust of Gordie by confidently crossing the tracks and beginning to feed. "She didn't look back at me and didn't need to." They coexist in a state of perfect trust and harmony. The deer remains until an approaching train frightens her off.

"What I was looking at was some sort of gift, something given with a carelessness that was appalling." For the psychic meaning of this remarkable gift, we look to the symbolic values of the deer. The opening lines of the Jerusalem Bible version of Psalm 42 equate the deer with the human spirit: "As a doe longs for running streams, so longs my soul for you, my God." Cirlot's A Dictionary of Symbols doesn't treat doe, but identifies an analogous animal, the gazelle, as "an emblem of the soul" and of "the persecution of the passions and the aggressive, self-destructive aspect of the unconscious." Another related animal, the stag, is said to represent "the way of solitude and purity." Interestingly, the same source notes that the stag is "the secular enemy of the serpent," a variation on which will figure prominently a little later in the adventure. What this gift seems to signify is the awakening of Gordie's spiritual nature. The deer is his soul, which he had not known before. Although the boy doesn't understand all this, he does intuit the deer's import: "for me it was the best part of the trip, the cleanest part, and it was the moment I found myself returning to, almost helplessly, when there was trouble in my life." We realize that this state of grace is not carelessly given at all, but earned by Gordie's inner readiness. An awakened soul is essential for the tests that are yet to come. When Gordie returns to the camp and the other boys, he doesn't tell them about the deer. This is his secret.

A final obstacle stands between the boys and the object of their quest, between Gordie and the development of his ego. That obstacle is the dragon who guards the treasure, denying access to all comers. In his discussion of the child archetype, Carl Jung asserts that "the threat to one's inmost self from dragons and serpents points to the danger of the newly acquired consciousness being swallowed up again by the instinctive psyche, the unconscious" [The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1969]. Gordie's recent experiences of individuation—crossing the threshold, escaping the train, seeing the deer—have strengthened and developed his conscious ego and his spiritual dimension. But he is not yet secure. As Neumann pointed out earlier, the dragon must be slain in order to sever the tie "to the mother and to childhood, and also to the unconscious." As dragons are scarce in Maine, the leeches infesting the beaver pond must function as a displaced dragon, just as the pond itself is a continuation of Gordie's sea journey into the unconscious.

Gordie's dreams have anticipated this swim and warned of the threat that the unconscious poses to the developing consciousness. When the four boys emerge from the pond after their swim, they discover their bodies covered with bloodsuckers. Gordie and Chris take turns plucking the repulsive creatures off the other's body. Then Gordie sees "the granddaddy of all of them clinging to my testicles, its body swelled to four times its normal size."

Jung relates a patient's dream that is remarkably like Gordie's situation. In the dream "a snake shot out of a cave and bit him [Jung's patient] in the genital region. This dream occurred at the moment when the patient was convinced of the truth of analysis and was beginning to free himself from the bonds of his mother-complex" [Campbell]. The snake-dragon-leech, by threatening Gordie's sexuality, is attempting to prevent maturation and the subsequent ego independence it represents.

Terror-stricken, Gordie can't bring himself to touch the leech and appeals to Chris to remove it. But Chris cannot help. Gordie must confront the dragon himself. "I reached down again and picked it off and it burst between my fingers. My own blood ran across my palm and inner wrist in a warm flood. I began to cry." Although Gordie has killed the leech, he himself is wounded. The leech, the chthonic symbol of the subterranean world of the unconscious, appears to have achieved mastery even in the moment of its own death. Gordie faints, that is, he loses his consciousness, and falls to the ground as if dead. Symbolically the wound is fatal. This is as it must be: Gordie has to die in order to be reborn. The sacrificial blood that he sheds is in the cause of his own growth and of the redemption of his society. Neumann explains that "the transformation of the hero through the dragon fight is a transfiguration, a glorification, indeed an apotheosis, the central feature of which is the birth of a higher mode of personality."

That transfiguration marks for Gordie a significant step in his passage from childhood to maturity, establishing an ego consciousness independent of his parents. This development is both a fruit of his quest and a precondition for the successful completion of his journey which he resumes when he regains consciousness.

As the four boys approach their destination, the weather begins to change. The arrival of storm clouds signals the end of three months of bright clear skies. The boy's shadows grow "fuzzy and ill-defined." Then the sun is blotted out: "I looked down and saw that my shadow had disappeared entirely." To Jung the shadow is the primitive, instinctive part of the psyche. Gordie stands poised on the brink of discovery. Elemental forces are gathering to punctuate the climax of the adventure. A cosmic blue-white fireball races along the track, passes the boys, and then disappears without a trace.

When Vern, the herald who called the adventure, spots Ray Brower's pale white hand sticking out of the underbrush, the skies open, loosing a downpour. "It was as if we were being rebuked for our discovery, and it was frightening." Rebuked perhaps, but the rain marks the end of the drought that has oppressed the land for months. The consequences for the life of the community of Gordie's long journey have already begun.

In death Brower is defenseless against the chthonic forces: black ants crawl over his hand and face, a beetle creeps out of his mouth and stalks across his cheek. Gordie is sickened, but what makes a stronger impression still is that Ray's feet are bare. His sneakers are caught in some brambles several feet away. The realization hits Gordie hard: "The train had knocked him out of his Keds just as it had knocked the life out of his body." The Keds are a powerful symbol for Gordie—of youth, of life, of the physical journey itself. He reflects on what death means for a twelve year old, what he wouldn't get to do, ordinary things like pulling a girl's braid in homeroom or wearing out the eraser on his pencil. Through the agency of a pair of filthy tennis shoes, Gordie finally is able to transmute death from an abstraction to a concretion and to understand it as a denial of life.

When Ace Merrill, Eyeball Chambers, and their gang arrive to claim the body as their prize, Chris and Gordie warn them off. Gordie senses the unfairness of it: "as if their easy way was the right way, the only way. They had come in cars." The older boys are disqualified from victory, from achieving the goal, not only because they took the easy way but also because they have broken the law in stealing the car. They represent negative forces that would usurp the treasure.

Ace Merrill orders Gordie to be sensible and relinquish the treasure and credit to his gang. Gordie's scorn is as great as his courage: "Suck my fat one, you cheap dimestore hood." His assertion of masculine dominance enrages Ace, who starts toward him intending to break both his arms. Only through Chris's introduction of a weapon, his father's pistol, is Gordie spared an immediate beating. Firing the gun first into the air and then at Ace's feet, Chris drives off the usurpers. That Chris, not Gordie, uses the gun is striking, but is in accord with Chris's status as the leader of the gang, war chief of the tribe. Gordie's role has always been that of the shaman, the story-telling medicine man in touch with the spirit world.

The big boys driven off, Chris and Gordie discuss what to do with the body. The strength of Chris's desire to carry it out of the woods suggests the depth of his need for approval and acceptance by his parents and the entire adult world. Finally, he is persuaded by his friend not to risk potential trouble if the big boys somehow implicated them in Brower's death.

As they leave, Gordie reflects on Ray Brower and mortality: "He was a boy our age, he was dead, and I rejected the idea that anything about it could be natural." Why? Probably because he felt he could guard against extra-natural causes; it was the natural ones that sneak up on you. The berry pail haunts him, though. Throughout his adventure Gordie has projected onto the missing boy. His own sense of self was so fragile that he had to see the body to be sure it wasn't himself. This confusion is evident in the mature writer's reflection: "That boy was me, I think. And the thought which follows, chilling me like a dash of cold water, is: Which boy do you mean?" The matter is still not entirely settled. We see the twenty-two-year-old Gordie exploring similar themes in "Stud City." Even the thirty-four-year-old writer is troubled from time to time. He remembers the berry pail and thinks about finding it: "it's mostly just the idea of holding that pail in my two hands, I guess—as much a symbol of my living as his dying, proof that I really do know which boy it was—which boy of the five of us."

Unlike the journey to the body, the return is uneventful. Retracing their steps, the boys cross the trestle and pass through the dump without incident. The town is still asleep when they arrive at five o'clock on Sunday morning, a propitious time for a return or a rebirth. Chris needs confirmation of their adventure: "We did it, didn't we? It was worth it, wasn't it?" "Sure it was," Gordie assures him. The parting from Vern and Teddy is routine, but between Chris and Gordie there is an undercurrent of things left unsaid: "I wanted to say something more to Chris but didn't know how to. . . . Speech destroys the functions of love, I think."

After the two boys part, there remains for Gordie one final act to conclude the adventure: the ritual cleansing and dressing of wounds. Standing at the kitchen sink, he scrubs his body all over with especial attention to his crotch. The mark left by the leech is fading, but a tiny scar will always serve as a reminder of his struggle.

What has Gordie's agon accomplished? At the onset of the journey two kinds of deficiencies required remedy. The first was Gordie's own psychic need to defeat his personal oppressors and to grow beyond the bounds of childhood. As he recapitulated the archetypal rites of passage, he prevailed over Milo and Chopper, the leeches, and the older boys. He achieved his goal of discovering the body and helped prevent the negative forces represented by the older boys from claiming it. He confronted the loss of his brother and his own worst fears of death and emasculation. He forged bonds of affection and mutual support with Chris. He moved beyond childhood and mother in the discovery of his spirit and the development of his own ego.

The second deficiency that Gordie was called upon to remedy was the sterility and lack of love in the kingdom of Castle Rock. Here, the fruit of his journey would appear less than "a world-historical, macrocosmic triumph" [Campbell]. His actions have not created a revolution of fertility and love. Yet Gordie's initiation does have results that impact on the larger community. When Gordie and his companions arrive at Ray Brower's body, the skies open and rain pours down for the first time in three months, ending the devastating drought that has plagued the land. When Gordie and Chris stand up to Ace Merrill's gang, they reestablish a rule of justice that had been lost in Castle Rock. And Gordie's actions testify to a truth forgotten by the adult world—the truth of love and caring. His concern for the lost body of Ray Brower initiates his quest. His love for Chris closes it and enables the one-time loser to succeed in a college prep course in high school and go on to college and graduate school.

But it is as writer that Gordie can have the greatest influence on his world. In a 1989 interview [published in Stephen King, The Second Decade] Tony Magistrale asked about the use of writers as protagonists in several of King's recent books.

[Magistrale]: But it also seems to me that in the many books which feature writers and writing you have endowed these characters with certain powers. . . .

[King]: Well, we do have powers. The guy in The Dark Half says that writers, actors, and actresses are the only recognized mediums of our society.

The storyteller is shaman, then, the one in touch with the world of spirit. His function is to reveal that world to his people.

The early stories ("Stud City" and "The Revenge of Lard Ass Hogan") show the suffering and the guilt and the need for retribution experienced by the young Gordon Lachance. The final story, told by the mature narrator, of four twelve-year-olds venturing along the railroad tracks to see a dead body—that story demonstrates the power of honesty, courage, and love. The great boon that Gordie Lachance brings back from his quest are those values that offer redemption for his society.