Steven King begins The Body with "The most important things are the hardest things to say. . . . Words shrink things that seem limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. . . ." Shaping important experiences into a form to be communicated is one of the major themes of the novella, and into it King incorporates several levels of archetypal experience. He cites the "high ritual to all fundamental events, the rites of passage, the magic corridor where the change happens"; and even at the beginning of the walk down the railroad tracks, "bright and heliographing in the sun," Gordon lachance knows he will never "forget that moment, no matter how old I get"; as the adventure progresses, the hike turns "into what we had suspected it was all along: serious business." The journey the four boys take to find ray Brower's body is more than just a walk along railroad tracks; extending through time as well as space, it integrates diverse rites of passage into one intensely concentrated experience.

In the introduction to Night Shift, King asserts, "All our fears add up to one great fear. . . . We're afraid of the body under the sheet. It's our body." Consciousness of the physical body—its sensations, vulnerability and ultimate termination—is the focus of horror literature; and while The Body is not a horror story, bodily sensations, the physical self, and the dangers that beset it are emphasized and analyzed. Starting over the GS&WM trestle high above Castle river, Gordon lachance becomes "acutely aware of all the noises" inside him: "The steady thump of my heart, the bloodbeat in my ears like a drum being played with brushes, the creak of sinews like the strings of a violin." Halfway across, when he hears the approaching train, he describes for over a page how "all sensory input became intensified." Other descriptions of intense physical sensations appear in passages describing the leech pond, the episode with the doe, and the beating Gordon receives from Ace Merrill and Fuzzy Bracowicz.

Beyond an awareness of the human body, a growing realization of its physical vulnerability draws the boys on the journey. The narrator's concern for such vulnerability appears in his comparison of Brower's body to "a ripped-open laundry bag," in his description of the dead boy's eyes filling with hail, and in his concern for the boy "so alone and so defenseless in the dark. . . . If something wanted to eat on him, it would." lachance went on the hike because of mortality, "the shadows that are always somewhere behind our eyes . . . what Bruce Springsteen calls the darkness on the edge of town." Going to view Brower's body is one way of acknowledging and defying death: "everyone wants to dare that darkness in spite of the jalopy bodies that some joker of a God gave us . . . not in spite of our jalopy bodies but because of them."

This desire to confront the darkness inherent in the body pulls the boys forward on what is, at the literal level, a journey to see death. The subtitle, "Fall from Innocence," refers not only to their loss of innocence but also to the fall of Man and the punishment of that fall by death. The boys' language indicates their awareness that this trip is more than just an overnight adventure. When Vera Tessio first announces the trip in the clubhouse and considers the consequences, he states, "This is worth it," and later he emphasizes, "we hafta see him . . . we hafta . . . but maybe it shouldn't be no good time." Gordon, speaking for the others, acknowledges, "the fascination of the thing drew us on. . . . We were all crazy to see that kid's body . . . we had come to believe we deserved to see it." What fascinates the boys at a level below their conscious thought is the archetype of the journey, whose significance they sense: "Unspoken—maybe it was too fundamental to be spoken—was the idea that this was a big thing." They never really question their "decision to walk down the tracks," for such a journey forward, in time and growth as well as in space, is as inevitable as boys growing into men.

This journey begins by moving them away from home and boyhood toward the world and adolescence. "Home . . . is a metaphysical principle and an ontological condition embodied in a place: the location which affirms who I am, projects what I may be, and vindicates whatever I have had to do to get there" [Langdon Elsbree, The rituals of life: Patterns in Narratives, 1982]. Abused or neglected by parents, each of the boys has been forced into a social identity which he despises; for each of the boys, home has become a limitation. Teddy fights against being labeled the son of a "looney" by Milo Pressman, Vern rejects being treated like a juvenile delinquent because of his brothers, Chris rejects his brothers and his father, and Gordon withdraws from his family that ignores him. Their small town environment has forced them into being "clearly defined contestants with titles, insignia, and traditional sexual or social roles," but they reject these roles, and part of their initial momentum, as they set out, "is the need to break away, or find a new home, identity, or commitment" [Elsbree]. When they are alone, Chris lectures Gordon on the need to go to college and escape: "I know what people think of my family in this town. I know what they think of me and what they expect. . . . I want to go someplace where nobody knows me and I don't have any black marks against me before I start." In the excerpts from lachance's writings, Chico rejects his family and its lifestyle to head for Stud City while lard Ass Hogan takes his revenge on his parents and small town society.

The movement of the journey to escape is contrasted with inertia, stagnation, and images of drowning. Chris warns Gordon to leave friends who will "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." Gordon equates this image of drowning with a life unrealized in two later instances: he dreams of the corpses of Vern and Teddy pulling down first Chris and then himself, and he comments about Chris, "I could not just leave him to sink or swim on his own. If he had drowned, that [best] part of me would have drowned with him, I think." Yet three of the boys do die without realizing their potentials.

The journey in contemporary literature tends to include "only the temporary lovers, friends, associates; more rarely the hard-won intimacy with a single companion, or two" [Elsbree], and Gordon acknowledges that "Friends come in and out of your life like busboys in a restaurant . . . when I think of that dream, the corpses under the water pulling implacably at my legs, it seems right that it should be that way." In such a psychic journey, "the self is grateful to find it has the strength to escape the predation of others and to travel on alone" [Elsbree].

In addition to breaking out of a confining existence, Gordon tries to escape the domination of his dead brother together with the guilt he feels about Denny's death. Gordon has always been ignored by his parents and most of the town while they doted on his brother. Even George Dusset extols Denny's virtues and has "a beautiful vision" of the dead boy while he cheats Gordon at the scales. At Denny's graduation Gordon had rebelled and drunk too much cheap wine, but after the older brother's death the guilt returns, and Denny's ghost announces in dreams, "It should have been you, Gordon. " The same guilt appears in lachance's story when the corpse of Chico's brother Johnny returns with similar words. Brower's death, like Denny's, was accidental, and by walking to confront that illogical death—and thus his own and his brother's mortality—lachance moves away from blind acceptance of the guilt and inferiority imposed on him by his parents and the town toward an acceptance of himself and the nature of existence: "Some people drown, that's all. It's not fair, but it happens."

Thus, while this expedition moves toward death in that the goal is a corpse, it also moves toward death in the sense of a journey forward in time toward the demise of the boys' own bodies. Dylan Thomas in the poem, "Twenty-Four Years," describes "a journey / By the light of the meat-eating sun" whose "final direction" is toward "the elementary town," and the boys are embarked on that same mortal trip. Brower's journey is over, as are those of the athletes who were crippled or killed, proving to Gordon they "were as much flesh and blood as I was." Dennis lachance has also entered the "elementary town," as has his literary equivalent, Johnny May; and the beavers seen alongside the tracks will soon join them: "They'll shoot them some beavers and scare off the rest and then knock out their dam. . . . Who cares about beavers?" Foreshadowings of the boys' own mortality appear all about them, e.g., in their flipping a "goocher" at the town dump and in Gosset's quoting the Bible to Gordon, " 'In the midst of life, we are in death.' Did you know that?" Teddy flirts with death in his truck-and-train-dodging and nearly finds it when he falls from the top of the tree. Chico thinks, "Nothing happened to Johnny that isn 't going to happen to you, too, sooner or later, " and the adult Gordon finally recounts the later deaths of Teddy, Vern, and Chris.

Complementing these foreshadowings are images that confuse the quick and the dead to highlight the boys' inevitable deaths. After Chris falls down in the same position as Brower's body, Gordon looks "wildly at Chris's feet to make sure his sneakers were still on," and when Gordon tells the leDio story, he sees the dead hero's face replaced by the imagined face of ray Brower. But Gordon's chief confusion is between himself and the corpse, for in confronting ray Brower's death, he is facing his own. His dream of Denny concludes with the corpse's accusation, "It should have been you," but, so far as his parents are concerned, Gordon feels he is already dead. The "old reliable standby, 'Did your mother ever have any kids that lived?' " loses its humor when compared to Gordon's earlier remark about his mother's feelings after Denny's death: "Her only kid was dead and she had to do something to take her mind off it." The adult lachance, looking back on his experiences at twelve, thinks "That boy was me. . . . And the thought which follows, chilling me like a dash of cold water, is: Which boy do you mean?" The confusion is natural, for, like Margaret in Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem, "Spring and Fall: to a young child," it is himself he mourns for.

Any realistic account of boys at the edge of adolescence inevitably involves sexual imagery, and The Body incorporates as one of its thematic strands the sexual preoccupations, ambiguities, and uncertainties of its pubescent heroes. The boys, all "close to being thirteen," reveal their sexual preoccupation in their language, whose most common expletive is "balls." For example, to describe fear, Vern says, " 'My balls crawled up so high I thought they was trine [sic] to get back home,' " and Gordon describes fear as a pole-vaulter who "dug his pole all the way into my balls, it felt like, and ended up sitting astride my heart." Chris refuses to take a drink "even to show he had, you know, big balls."

Sexual fears and insecurity are evident in the many references to injured testicles. When Gordon pulls Teddy off the fence around the town dump and they fall, the narrator complains, "He squashed my balls pretty good. . . . Nothing hurts like having your balls squashed." In the later fight with Ace Merrill and Fuzzy Bracowicz, Gordon receives a knee in the crotch and protects his "wounded balls," which Aunt Evvie Chalmers warns him "are going to swell up to the size of Mason jars." Worse than injured testicles are lost testicles, a threat personified by Pressman's dog, Chopper: "every kid in Castle rock squeezed his balls between his legs when Chopper's name was mentioned." According to rumor, Chopper has been taught to attack certain parts of the body, and an intruder into the town dump "would hear the dread cry: 'Chopper! Sic! Balls!' And that kid would be a soprano the rest of his life."

The climax of this expedition is a test of masculinity in which a pistol that belongs to Chris's father decides the victory between younger boys trying to prove their masculinity and older ones trying to assert their power. A contest "where the testing and defense of self is central" [Elsbree] is a common activity in adolescence, and such contests appear throughout The Body: it opens with card games, climaxes with the fight over the body, and concludes with the boys trying to survive the game of life. The story also incorporates elements of the contest in other ways. Gordon's surname, lachance, carries the connotation of a game, and his best memories of Denny, who was an All-Conference halfback, involve watching him play ball. In the embedded story, lard Ass Hogan enrolls in the pie eating contest and, in his own way, wins.

The major contest, the fight over ray Brower's body, sets older and younger brothers against each other. Both Chris and Vern are facing their actual brothers across the battle line, and it is Ace's mention of Denny that triggers Gordon's response: in insulting Ace he is striking back at all the people who have praised Denny and expected Gordon to be like him.

The contest in which the younger boys achieve a qualified victory echoes, perhaps ironically, epic engagements in the structure of its action and in its battle prize. The corpse has no value except as an object with which to achieve honor or fame, and, as the story concludes, even that value is denied the participants. The two groups stand on opposite sides of a water-logged bog with Brower's body between them like the Greeks and Trojans on opposite sides of the river Scamander. First, insults and dares are exchanged; then minor warriors, Charlie Hogan and Billy Tessio, start forward, but are called back by Ace Merrill, their leader; Ace offers to negotiate with the other leader, Gordon lachance; Gordon returns an insult and both sides prepare for battle. Then Chris, exhibiting his version of the armor of Achilles, fires the revolver and changes the odds. The phallic gun is particularly appropriate, as are the insults ("Bite my bag," "Suck my fat one"), for the conflict is one of masculine pride, and "Apart from words, the male often fights with the usual phallic extensions of self and/or weapons of power." Although Jackie Mudgett pulls out a knife, the more potent, adult weapon of the younger boys decides the battle, a victory anticipated by Gordon's earlier firing of the gun (sexual maturation) in the alley behind the Blue Point Diner: " 'You did it, you did it! Gordie did it!' "

When the boys return home, Gordon, like the Greek heroes after battle, ritually cleans himself—"face, neck, pits, belly . . . crotch—my testicles in particular"—and throws the rag away. But the epic echoes and the masculine pride ("Biggest one in four counties") are all illusions; after the excitement of battle cools, Gordon acknowledges that ray Brower's body is "a tatty prize to be fought over by two bunches of stupid hick kids." Such heroics have little merit beyond schoolboy conflicts, lachance implies, because the outcome of any contest depends more on chance than ability, and the odds are against the individual: "they tell you to step right up and spin the Wheel of Fortune, and it spins so pretty and the guy steps on a pedal and it comes up double zeros, house number, everybody loses."

A similar nonheroic attitude manifests itself in lachance's ambiguous attitude toward sexuality. In the "Stud City" excerpt, Chico is a sensitive but typical car-crazy teenager with his libido in overdrive; the section opens with his deflowering a virgin and ends with his "rolling" on route 41. But this early writing also describes sex as "Bozo the Clown bouncing around on a spring. How could a woman look at an erect penis without going off into mad gales of laughter?" The older lachance describes the excerpt as "an extremely sexual story written by an extremely inexperienced young man" and as "the work of a young man every bit as insecure as he was inexperienced." The insecurity remains, however, in the comments of the older lachance. It manifests itself in his feelings toward Chris, in his remarks about masturbation, in the leech episode, and in his literary allusions. When they separate after the hike, the twelve-year-old Gordon feels self-conscious about his love for Chris, acknowledging that "Speech destroys the functions of love"; later, as they study together every night through high school, he wonders if his former friends will think he went "faggot," but defends himself by saying, "it was only survival. We were clinging to each other in deep water." When he hears of Chris's death, he drives out of town and cries "for damn near half an hour," yet he cannot share his feelings, even with his wife, for such action would be considered feminine. Sexuality can be seen as hilarious but the rest of the macho creed remains locked in place: strong feelings must be expressed only in isolation or in a joking fashion.

Masturbation, another subject usually treated with humor, also has a serious side in the story. Jokes about it run through the story from Vern's "Fuck your hand, man," through the initial verdict on the swim and the parting speech of Gordon and Chris, to the last comment on the treehouse which "smelled like a shootoff in a haymow." But masturbation is also a part of the nostalgia for childhood innocence: for the boy "masturbation is freedom and omnipotence." The adult lachance associates the pleasure of his early writing with masturbation: "The act of writing itself is done in secret, like masturbation. . . . For me, it always wants to be sex and always falls short—it's always that adolescent handjob in the bathroom with the door locked." Using masturbation as a metaphor for writing conveys the boy's and the adult's real attitudes better than the comments which the boys self-consciously swap among themselves.

The most disturbing sexual image in the story is the leech which attaches itself to Gordon's scrotum while he is swimming. When he discovers it, the leech is "a bruised purplish-red" and has "swelled to four times its normal size." When he pulls the leech loose, it bursts and "My own blood ran across my palm and inner wrist in a warm flood." As they leave, he looks back at the leech, "deflated . . . but still ominous." The image is of selfcastration (pulling the leech loose) during tumescence and is more than a young man on the edge of adolescence can handle: he faints. The leech, a clinging third testicle, is swollen with blood like an erect penis (the opposite side of the image of Bozo the clown cited in "Stud City"), and both Chris and Gordon understand the inherent symbolism of the act. The deflation and the sexual significance, even for later years, are underlined by the adult lachance's equating "the burst leech: dead, deflated . . . but still ominous" with the "used condums" floating off Staten Island. When his wife asks about the crescent-shaped scar left by the leech, he automatically lies, for even symbolic castration experiences are not subjects to be shared with wives.

This castration image, raised earlier in the Chopper rumors, is underscored by lachance's references to ralph Ellison's novel, Invisible Man. He equates himself with the protagonist for he is as invisible to his parents as Jack the Bear is to society. Gordon's dreams in the novella are negative—dreams of people pulling him down or of his dead brother's return—and Invisible Man concludes with a dream in which the narrator is castrated by Bledso and the others who have been running his life. They ask him, "How does it feel to be free of illusion?" and he replies, "Painful and empty." Gordon also has been freeing himself of illusion: at the sound of the train's horn, his illusions fly apart letting him "know what both the heroes and cowards really heard when death flew at them"; he finds he cannot trust George Dusset's arithmetic; and in the meeting with Chopper, he gets his "first lesson in the vast difference between myth and reality"; he has few illusions about teachers after Chris's account of the stolen milk money; and he loses his illusions about death when he smells the decay and sees the beetle come out of Brower's mouth. The leeches lurking beneath the smooth surface of the pond complete the lesson about appearances: "The harder lesson to be learned is essentially paradoxical: how to live without illusion . . . and yet remain committed to some meaningful and coherent picture of things." For lachance, the commitment is to writing: "The only reason anyone writes stories is so they can understand the past and get ready for some future mortality..." This statement echoes Ellison's statement at the end of Invisible Man: "So why do I write, torturing myself to put it down? Because in spite of myself I've learned some things."

Understanding the self requires understanding the past, and the story's final journey is Gordon lachance's archetypal "return to a remembered place after years of absence" [Elsbree]. He returns in memory to the boys' journey down the railroad tracks, he fantasizes returning as an adult for the berry pail, and he describes an actual return to Castle rock. Since the original events, he had "thought remarkably little about those two days in September, at least consciously. The associations the memories bring to the surface are as unpleasant as week-old river-corpses brought to the surface by cannonfire." But in recounting the associations he offers his "inner life, its genesis, changes, restlessness, and moods . . . a journey . . . through the growth of consciousness and self . . . and its interplay with the external world" [Elsbree]. At times he feels "like the pre-adolescent Gordon lachance that once strode the earth, walking and talking and occasionally crawling on his belly like a reptile." He also identifies with the young man who wrote "Stud City," "a Gordon lachance younger than the one living and writing now . . . but not so young as the one who went with his friends that day." The narrator, trying "to look through an IBM keyboard and see that time," can "almost feel the skinny, scabbed boy still buried in this advancing body," for these and other stages in his development form a graph of personal identity, the self as "a construct or a series of constructs of subjective time which is inadequate to resist the march of chronological and historic time" [Elsbree]. In an interview, ralph Ellison argues that the search for identity "is the American theme. The nature of our society is such that we are prevented from knowing who we are," and that the search for and unification of his identity should be a major theme of a writer as American as Stephen King is not surprising. The final (or current) identity achieved is defined in the last pages of the work: "I'm a writer now . . . and most of the time I'm happy," although in an interview with Douglas E. Winter, King reserves his right to switch identities: "I'm just trying on all of these hats."

Writing enables lachance to come to terms with the emotions engendered by the adventure. The narrative exists in three reflexive forms—the basic story, the reprints of "Stud City," and "The revenge of lard Ass Hogan"—the latter two being set in a different typeface. Within these forms are various narrators, from the twelve-year-old boy to the "best-selling novelist who is more apt to have his paper back contracts reviewed than his books." The parts of the narrative comment on each other. For example, the older lachance evaluates the writing of his younger self, while the Hogan story begins as an oral account told by a twelve-year-old, switches to a published version written by the successful novelist, and then returns to the twelve-year-old's point of view. later Chris warns Gordon that the pie story may "never get written down" after the reader has already read it printed, and he suggests that "Maybe you'll even write about us guys," the account of which the reader is holding.

Writing succeeds for Gordon because it offers control over experience. In writing "Stud City" he found "a kind of dreadful exhilaration in seeing things that had troubled me for years come out in a new form, a form over which I had imposed control." Writing and religion, "The only two useful artforms, " permit a pattern to be imposed on the chaos of life: at the end of Invisible Man Ellison states, "the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived." Writing permits a systematic formulation of the plan or world view and provides the means for keeping it before not only the author but all of his readers. As the narrator of Invisible Man asks at the end, "Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?"

Most of the other themes of the work are incorporated through metaphors with writing. The body examined is not only Brower's but also the body of experience Gordon has shaped into the work and the body of works he has produced; the contest is the writer's attempt to decipher and communicate order out of raw experience; and sex appears in his analogy of writing to masturbation and artificial insemination. Writing, most of all, defines experience in relation to the narrator, a function he embodies in the metaphor of the blueberry pail which ray Brower lost and which lachance dreams of retrieving. He wants to "pull it out of time" and to read his own life in its rusty shine—"where I was, what I was doing, who I was loving, how I was getting along, where I was." Yet the act of writing has given him the blueberry bucket: through The Body he has retrieved the past, looked in its mirror, and found his "own face in whatever reflection might be left." The words whose power he denies at the beginning of the narrative have enabled him to capture and communicate the experiences of his life.

To see Gordon lachance as Stephen King is tempting. Many of the details match: the wife, three children, the million dollars from horror stories, the books made into movies, the youngest son who might be hydrocephalic, even the luck (LaChance) which King acknowledges. ray Brower's death by train and Gordon's close brush with it reflect the story King tells of an incident when he was four in which another child was killed by a train, although he states, "I have no memory of the incident at all; only of having been told about it some years after the fact."

Concluding that lachance is King would be tempting but unnecessary, for whether the writer is lachance or King, an examination of a story or any cultural artifact returns us "to both the culture and the maker as individualized expressions of certain universal human capacities and experiences, of which the living through stories is paramount. It is this perspective which is so valuable—one which sees the human symbolizing process of story making as fundamental to culture, to our creation of an inhabitable world" [Elsbree].

Stevens, King's namesake in The Breathing Method, the next story in the collection which contains The Body, says "Here, sir, there are always more tales"; and indeed, as long as there are more lives, there are always more tales, for although each individual repeats basic archetypal patterns in his journey from life to death, his variations, like Kings' brand names, root him in his time and mark him of his place. By translating these experiences into fiction, by sharing both the universalities and the particularities of existence, King and other writers help to break down the loneliness of life and even of death.