The breaking of boys and men: part five

BOYS BROKEN

When, on the brink of suicide, young Werther makes his final, desperate case to his beloved—that his boy-spirit, his very vitality depends on her undivided love and attention—Lotte, now married, responds with the last thing he wants to hear. “Be a man. Put an end to this dismal attachment to a creature who can do nothing but pity you.” (115)
Lotte’s mature and practical perspective is worthy of Freud in its psychological acuity, but the insight is no help to Werther, as the pitch of his feeling—inflamed, impossible, or otherwise—is the very condition that sustains him. He has experienced the ecstasy of living at that pitch, a psychic frequency to which uncompromised boys become easily attuned. When Lotte implores him to “be a man,” to get over the condition he has experienced as life itself, he witheringly responds that her words “could be printed and commended to the use of teachers.”
Werther had been schooled enough to sense that the purpose of culturally mandated education is not to enlarge or exercise a child’s spirit but to tame and subordinate it to culturally approved purposes, a process which from the spirited child’s standpoint is an unbearable violation.
By the time Barrie composed Peter Pan, the protocols of compulsory schooling were so firmly established in western minds as to be virtually unquestioned. There has long been and continues to be a proliferation of schemes for educational reform, but any serious reconsideration of compulsory schooling itself has been all but non-existent—except in stories.
For Barrie, who remembered being happy in school but not at university, submission to schooling was fundamentally opposed to the free expression of boy-spirit. In Peter Pan the embodiment of schooling is Hook, who loathes the very idea of Peter Pan, who confesses to being unable to look at him while he is sleeping, because there is something so untroubled about his posture.
Hook’s character, Barrie discloses to his readers, was fashioned in the crucible of school, and it is school’s central aim to capture and eliminate the likes of Peter Pan.
“Hook was not his true name. To reveal who he really was would even at this date set the country in ablaze; but as those who have read between the lines must already have guessed, he had been at a famous public school; and its traditions still clung to him like garments…and he still adhered in his walk to the school’s distinguished slouch. But above all he retained his passion for good form.” (229) The imposition of good form is the ultimate accomplishment of schooling, but it requires the gradual mastery and then the elimination of boy-spirit. Peter knows this instinctively. When Mrs. Darling, Wendy’s mother, asks Peter if she may adopt him, the first thing he asks her is “Would you send me to school?” Mrs. Darling tells him that she would, and then to an office, and then he would be a man. Peter tells her without reflection that he doesn’t want to go to school and learn “solemn things.” More direct than young Werther, he tells her, “I don’t want to be a man.”
The adopted lost boys ultimately bear out Peter’s reservation. “Before they had attended school a week they saw what goats they had been not to remain on the island; but it was too late now, and soon they settled down to being as ordinary as you or me or Jenkins minor. It is sad to have to say the power to fly gradually left them.” (231)

Later in the twentieth century, after the world wars, a new kind of boy’s story began making an insistent appearance. In these stories there is no rapturous flight, literally or figuratively; there is only falling, loss, and utter wreckage. A boy like Salinger’s Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye (1951) may have an intimation of a prior, golden world, but he will fail to locate it in the course of his sad, lonely truancy in Manhattan. Holden has just bolted from a prep school from which he was about to be dismissed for unsatisfactory effort. At the brink of nervous collapse, he imagines stepping off curbsides into an abyss. In this state he pictures himself in a field of rye at the top of a steep cliff where he is patrolling in order to catch wandering children before they can fall.
In John Knowles’ A Separate Peace (l959) Gene, a self-aware young man who has successfully mastered the good form necessary to make his way at his prep school, realizes that his best friend, Phineas, has a quality he longs for but cannot master: an untamable exuberance. Phineas’s playful spontaneity is counter-scholastic, if not downright anti-scholastic, and while it is infectious among his companions, it arouses a poisonous envy in Gene whose determined scholastic attainments have barred all access to such openheartedness. One evening on a study break Gene and Phineas climb up a tree to a limb overhanging a riverbank. To make one’s way far enough out on the limb to clear the bank when he jumps requires exceptional daring, and this prospect is thrilling to Phineas. As Phineas moves out along the limb, Gene, without reflection, jounces it with his foot, causing his friend to fall sickeningly to earth. The resulting injury ultimately kills him.
As the Cold War baby-boom years progressed, stories of fallen, broken boys proliferated. The phenomenally popular Catcher in the Rye was for a time viewed warily by schools and, due to Holden’s frank and sometimes vulgar utterances, banned in some, but within a decade the book, along with Separate Peace and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), became required school reading. But even as the story of the fallen boy became standard school fare, successive tellings grew darker and grittier. By the early nineteen sixties, there is a clear sense in the strongest boys’ stories that the descent is past mattering; the only thing left to report is the hellish quality of the fallen condition.
Even before his early death in 1988, Raymond Carver was widely recognized as a modern master of the short story. One of his earliest published stories, “Nobody Said Anything” (1963), recounts a single truant day in the life of an unnamed middle school-aged boy. He awakes to an overheard quarrel between his parents and immediately goads his younger brother, with whom he shares a bed, into a foul-mouthed exchange of complaints, in which the brother is alternately referred to a “chicken-shit,” an “asshole,” and a “royal asshole.” Unable to face the day and school, the boy feigns stomach trouble, and in the course of an unsupervised morning and afternoon while his parents are away at their jobs, he proceeds, as soon as his mother leaves the house, to smoke some of her cigarettes, watch morning television, masturbate, and rummage through the drawers in his parents’ bedroom in search of condoms and lubricants before deciding to go outdoors and fish.
Like the world inside, the world outdoors is ruined. The boy’s father has periodically taken him fishing, and in those outings, close to the elements, the boy vaguely senses a spark of vitality. As he proceeds through the mean streets of the working class town where he lives, a woman stops her car and asks if he needs a ride. The boy observes her warily: “She was thin and had pimples around her mouth. Her hair was up in curlers. But she was sharp enough. She had a brown sweater with nice boobs inside.” (7) They exchange a few awkward words before she drops him off near the creek where he intends to fish. The brief encounter with the woman arouses him sexually, and he fantasizes about being alone with her under the covers of his bed. He hurries over the embankment down to the creek and masturbates into it.
The creek bed lies adjacent to an airport runway. It is a fouled, forlorn watercourse, fed by drainage pipes. Crawling under a fence bearing a No Trespassing sign, the boy makes his way along the brackish water and begins fantasizing again about the woman, encountering her in her house as she is sitting on the toilet. He is about to masturbate again when there is a strike on his line. He reels in the fish with little effort. He recognizes that it is a trout, but there is something wrong with it. “It was the color of moss, that color green. It was as if he had been wrapped up in moss a long time, and the color had come off all over him.” The boy is troubled that the fish had not put up a fight. “I wondered if he was all right. I looked at him for a time longer, then I put him out of his pain.” (11)
Moving down the stream, the boy comes upon another boy, who excitedly tells him he has spotted the biggest fish he has ever seen. The boy, like the woman in the car, bears a haggard, ruined look: “He looked like a rat or something. I mean, he had buckteeth and skinny arms and this ragged long-sleeved shirt that was too small for him.” (12)
Together the boys pursue the fish and after some failed tries manage to catch it and bring it to land where the narrator breaks its spine and kills it. He sees that there is something wrong with this fish, too. “He was at least two feet long, queerly skinny, but bigger than anything I had ever caught.” (16) The boys immediately begin to argue about who will keep the fish, the smaller boy claiming he had spotted it, the narrator pointing out that he was the one who landed it. They decide to cut the fish in two but argue again about which half each will take home, the head being clearly preferable to the tail. The narrator knows he is bigger and stronger than his companion but decides not to have his way forcefully. He offers the tail end of the fish plus the sickly green trout, and the smaller boy agrees to take it.
When the boy arrives home, he hears his parents arguing in the kitchen. He knows he is late and possibly in trouble, but he hopes to enter the house triumphantly and to show off his trophy. He bursts into the kitchen exclaiming, “”You won’t believe what I caught at Birch Creek. Just look. Look here. Look at this. Look what I caught.” (20) He holds his creel open for his mother to see, and she is horrified. She asks if it is a snake and demands he take it out of the house. The boy excitedly tries to explain what a big fish he has caught and how difficult it was to land it, but his angry father yells at him to “take it the hell out of the kitchen and throw it in the goddamn garbage.”
Outside, doing as he is told, the boy looks inside his creel at his catch, now a gelatinous, unrecognizable mass. “I lifted him out,” the boy recounts as the story closes, “I held him. I held that half of him.”

Stephen King’s novel, The Body, is set in1960 in a working class town in Maine, a milieu remarkably similar to that depicted in “Nobody Said Anything.” The Body is the story of four twelve year-olds who embark on a kind of quest, but, as in Carver’s story, the quest has no redeeming objective, and it is carried out by damaged children in a ruined world. The narrative is set in motion as the four young friends learn that a boy their age, Ray Brower, is missing from home and is rumored to be lying dead at the base of a stretch of train tracks a few miles out of town. It is summer and the boys are free of school. One of the boys’ parents is criminally abusive, and the parents of the other three are inattentive enough that the boys are able to devise a ruse in which they will pretend to be sleeping overnight together in a tent while they go off in search of the missing boy’s body.
The boys’ stated mission is to find and possibly report the location of the body to the authorities, thereby gaining a kind of bragging rights, but the deeper motive seems to be the morbid fascination of beholding an actual corpse. Along the way, the friends face many obstacles and dangers, but any bracing sense of adventure in the outing is overwhelmed by the unrelieved ugliness of the world and people they encounter—and the ugliness the boys have already begun to incorporate in the conduct of their own lives. They have managed to create a world unto themselves, but it is no secret garden or Neverland. Their improvised clubhouse is, in Gordie’s words “a good place to smoke cigarettes and look at girly books.” Like Carver’s boy narrator, King’s twelve-year-olds are tough-minded and foul-mouthed; one of them, the brutally abused Teddy, is psychologically damaged beyond repair. In their banter they address one another as “you four-eyed pile of shit,” invite one another to “fuck your hand, man.” (297-98) They encounter no humane or accomplished adult. As they attempt to buy provisions for their journey, the grocer tries to cheat them at the counter. The narrator, untroubled by any sense of incivility or disrespect, shouts “Fuck you!” as he runs out of the store. Having trespassed over the fence of a junkyard in order to drink from a water pump, one of the boys finds himself on the forbidden side as the proprietor and his allegedly vicious dog approach. When the boy successfully regains the safe side of the fence, he lingers to taunt the proprietor’s dog—“Kiss my ass, Choppie! Kiss my ass! Bite shit!”—and then the proprietor, calling him “fat ass,” “lard-bucket.” When the proprietor cruelly answers the boy’s taunts, the ugliness of the boy’s invective intensifies: “YOUR MOTHER BLOWS DEAD RATS! I’LL KILL YOU, YOU FUCKING COCKSUCKER!” (348)
Gordie narrates The Body from the perspective of his thirties, looking back. He is, like the novel’s author, Stephen King, a writer; moreover he is a writer who has written some of King’s published stories and books. It is by no means clear whether the narrator/author is celebrating the near-feral antics of his principals or whether he is holding them up for concern. The boys go on to face many dangers. Following the rail tracks over a bridge, they are surprised by the rapid approach of a train and must run for their lives. Camping that night by a fire, Gordie entertains the others by telling a yarn about a fat and cruelly teased boy named David Hogan, whom his townsmen call Lard Ass. He enters a pie eating contest, to the mockery and delight of those who come to watch. As he is about to win the contest, he vomits copiously over the other contestants who in turn become ill, resulting in a vomitous chain reaction and, presumably, a kind of justice. The next day the boys go swimming to get some relief from the intense heat and find themselves covered with leeches. To his horror Gordie finds a leech has attached itself to his scrotum. He asks for help from the other boys, but they are too squeamish. Fearful and shaking with tears, he manages to detach the leech which bursts bloodily into his hands.
At length the spent boys spot the body of Ray Brower lying partly submerged in water at the base of the tracks. Gordie notes in exhaustive detail the position and condition of the body. He speculates with precision how the collision must have propelled the body to the spot where it came to rest, how the impact had lifted the boy out of his shoes. Where some kind of catharsis or revelation might be expected, there is nothing—beyond the realization that the boy was indeed dead. “That finally rammed it all the way home for me,” Gordie muses. “The kid was dead. The kid wasn’t sick, the kid wasn’t sleeping. The kid wasn’t going to get up in the morning anymore…The kid was dead; stone dead.” (408).
The dreary quest of the boy who went fishing in Carver’s story resulted in an unviewably grotesque prize: not a fish, but a mangled wreck of a fish. The quest of the four twelve-year-olds in The Body results in nothing at all. Four living boys seek and find a dead one. In their speech and in their actions the boys already bear the mark of the debased culture in which they are suspended, and on that very account the narrator/author seems to want to exonerate them, even commend them to our affection. This intention is made even more stridently in the action that follows the discovery of Ray Brower’s corpse. Soon after the boys arrive on the scene, they are confronted by a menacing band of teenagers who had hoped to discover the body themselves. The older boys, including one of the twelve-year-olds’ older brother, threaten the younger ones menacingly. In the ensuing showdown, Gordie defiantly stands his ground. He tells the boy threatening him to “suck my fat one, you cheap dime store hood.” One of the other younger boys has smuggled his father’s pistol out of the house and threatens to shoot the older boys if they advance. The teenagers back off, although later they will exact vicious physical revenge.
When Stephen King first published The Body, he included a subtitle: The Loss of Innocence. Yet there is no loss of innocence narrated in the tale. The boys have already lost innocence when they enter the story. Their debased language, the unacknowledged cruelty and insensitivity revealed in their “victorious” encounters with the older boys and adults, even the stories they tell for delight reveal how far they have come from the redemptive spirit of the puer aeternus. The boys talk the talk and think the thoughts of failed and bitter men.
Nothing like the lilt and exuberance of Peter Pan can possibly “break through” into the dispirited, gritty world of Carver’s story and King’s novel. Those stories along with the profusion of kindred stories that have followed represent a kind of epitaph to boy-spirit. Barrie began Peter Pan with the assertion that every boy, except one, grows up. As long as there is one, and he is known, boy-spirit might live on to invigorate all that it touches. At the conclusion of The Body, Gordie, now grown to manhood, reveals that the three fellow travelers of his boyhood have all died young. No boy has grown up, except one. That one is the writer, the one left to tell the tale, and the tale is that if a boy sets off to find himself in the world as it is, he will find a dead boy.

BOYS BROKEN

When, on the brink of suicide, young Werther makes his final, desperate case to his beloved—that his boy-spirit, his very vitality depends on her undivided love and attention—Lotte, now married, responds with the last thing he wants to hear. “Be a man. Put an end to this dismal attachment to a creature who can do nothing but pity you.” (115)
Lotte’s mature and practical perspective is worthy of Freud in its psychological acuity, but the insight is no help to Werther, as the pitch of his feeling—inflamed, impossible, or otherwise—is the very condition that sustains him. He has experienced the ecstasy of living at that pitch, a psychic frequency to which uncompromised boys become easily attuned. When Lotte implores him to “be a man,” to get over the condition he has experienced as life itself, he witheringly responds that her words “could be printed and commended to the use of teachers.”
Werther had been schooled enough to sense that the purpose of culturally mandated education is not to enlarge or exercise a child’s spirit but to tame and subordinate it to culturally approved purposes, a process which from the spirited child’s standpoint is an unbearable violation.
By the time Barrie composed Peter Pan, the protocols of compulsory schooling were so firmly established in western minds as to be virtually unquestioned. There has long been and continues to be a proliferation of schemes for educational reform, but any serious reconsideration of compulsory schooling itself has been all but non-existent—except in stories.
For Barrie, who remembered being happy in school but not at university, submission to schooling was fundamentally opposed to the free expression of boy-spirit. In Peter Pan the embodiment of schooling is Hook, who loathes the very idea of Peter Pan, who confesses to being unable to look at him while he is sleeping, because there is something so untroubled about his posture.
Hook’s character, Barrie discloses to his readers, was fashioned in the crucible of school, and it is school’s central aim to capture and eliminate the likes of Peter Pan.
“Hook was not his true name. To reveal who he really was would even at this date set the country in ablaze; but as those who have read between the lines must already have guessed, he had been at a famous public school; and its traditions still clung to him like garments…and he still adhered in his walk to the school’s distinguished slouch. But above all he retained his passion for good form.” (229) The imposition of good form is the ultimate accomplishment of schooling, but it requires the gradual mastery and then the elimination of boy-spirit. Peter knows this instinctively. When Mrs. Darling, Wendy’s mother, asks Peter if she may adopt him, the first thing he asks her is “Would you send me to school?” Mrs. Darling tells him that she would, and then to an office, and then he would be a man. Peter tells her without reflection that he doesn’t want to go to school and learn “solemn things.” More direct than young Werther, he tells her, “I don’t want to be a man.”
The adopted lost boys ultimately bear out Peter’s reservation. “Before they had attended school a week they saw what goats they had been not to remain on the island; but it was too late now, and soon they settled down to being as ordinary as you or me or Jenkins minor. It is sad to have to say the power to fly gradually left them.” (231)

Later in the twentieth century, after the world wars, a new kind of boy’s story began making an insistent appearance. In these stories there is no rapturous flight, literally or figuratively; there is only falling, loss, and utter wreckage. A boy like Salinger’s Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye (1951) may have an intimation of a prior, golden world, but he will fail to locate it in the course of his sad, lonely truancy in Manhattan. Holden has just bolted from a prep school from which he was about to be dismissed for unsatisfactory effort. At the brink of nervous collapse, he imagines stepping off curbsides into an abyss. In this state he pictures himself in a field of rye at the top of a steep cliff where he is patrolling in order to catch wandering children before they can fall.
In John Knowles’ A Separate Peace (l959) Gene, a self-aware young man who has successfully mastered the good form necessary to make his way at his prep school, realizes that his best friend, Phineas, has a quality he longs for but cannot master: an untamable exuberance. Phineas’s playful spontaneity is counter-scholastic, if not downright anti-scholastic, and while it is infectious among his companions, it arouses a poisonous envy in Gene whose determined scholastic attainments have barred all access to such openheartedness. One evening on a study break Gene and Phineas climb up a tree to a limb overhanging a riverbank. To make one’s way far enough out on the limb to clear the bank when he jumps requires exceptional daring, and this prospect is thrilling to Phineas. As Phineas moves out along the limb, Gene, without reflection, jounces it with his foot, causing his friend to fall sickeningly to earth. The resulting injury ultimately kills him.
As the Cold War baby-boom years progressed, stories of fallen, broken boys proliferated. The phenomenally popular Catcher in the Rye was for a time viewed warily by schools and, due to Holden’s frank and sometimes vulgar utterances, banned in some, but within a decade the book, along with Separate Peace and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), became required school reading. But even as the story of the fallen boy became standard school fare, successive tellings grew darker and grittier. By the early nineteen sixties, there is a clear sense in the strongest boys’ stories that the descent is past mattering; the only thing left to report is the hellish quality of the fallen condition.
Even before his early death in 1988, Raymond Carver was widely recognized as a modern master of the short story. One of his earliest published stories, “Nobody Said Anything” (1963), recounts a single truant day in the life of an unnamed middle school-aged boy. He awakes to an overheard quarrel between his parents and immediately goads his younger brother, with whom he shares a bed, into a foul-mouthed exchange of complaints, in which the brother is alternately referred to a “chicken-shit,” an “asshole,” and a “royal asshole.” Unable to face the day and school, the boy feigns stomach trouble, and in the course of an unsupervised morning and afternoon while his parents are away at their jobs, he proceeds, as soon as his mother leaves the house, to smoke some of her cigarettes, watch morning television, masturbate, and rummage through the drawers in his parents’ bedroom in search of condoms and lubricants before deciding to go outdoors and fish.
Like the world inside, the world outdoors is ruined. The boy’s father has periodically taken him fishing, and in those outings, close to the elements, the boy vaguely senses a spark of vitality. As he proceeds through the mean streets of the working class town where he lives, a woman stops her car and asks if he needs a ride. The boy observes her warily: “She was thin and had pimples around her mouth. Her hair was up in curlers. But she was sharp enough. She had a brown sweater with nice boobs inside.” (7) They exchange a few awkward words before she drops him off near the creek where he intends to fish. The brief encounter with the woman arouses him sexually, and he fantasizes about being alone with her under the covers of his bed. He hurries over the embankment down to the creek and masturbates into it.
The creek bed lies adjacent to an airport runway. It is a fouled, forlorn watercourse, fed by drainage pipes. Crawling under a fence bearing a No Trespassing sign, the boy makes his way along the brackish water and begins fantasizing again about the woman, encountering her in her house as she is sitting on the toilet. He is about to masturbate again when there is a strike on his line. He reels in the fish with little effort. He recognizes that it is a trout, but there is something wrong with it. “It was the color of moss, that color green. It was as if he had been wrapped up in moss a long time, and the color had come off all over him.” The boy is troubled that the fish had not put up a fight. “I wondered if he was all right. I looked at him for a time longer, then I put him out of his pain.” (11)
Moving down the stream, the boy comes upon another boy, who excitedly tells him he has spotted the biggest fish he has ever seen. The boy, like the woman in the car, bears a haggard, ruined look: “He looked like a rat or something. I mean, he had buckteeth and skinny arms and this ragged long-sleeved shirt that was too small for him.” (12)
Together the boys pursue the fish and after some failed tries manage to catch it and bring it to land where the narrator breaks its spine and kills it. He sees that there is something wrong with this fish, too. “He was at least two feet long, queerly skinny, but bigger than anything I had ever caught.” (16) The boys immediately begin to argue about who will keep the fish, the smaller boy claiming he had spotted it, the narrator pointing out that he was the one who landed it. They decide to cut the fish in two but argue again about which half each will take home, the head being clearly preferable to the tail. The narrator knows he is bigger and stronger than his companion but decides not to have his way forcefully. He offers the tail end of the fish plus the sickly green trout, and the smaller boy agrees to take it.
When the boy arrives home, he hears his parents arguing in the kitchen. He knows he is late and possibly in trouble, but he hopes to enter the house triumphantly and to show off his trophy. He bursts into the kitchen exclaiming, “”You won’t believe what I caught at Birch Creek. Just look. Look here. Look at this. Look what I caught.” (20) He holds his creel open for his mother to see, and she is horrified. She asks if it is a snake and demands he take it out of the house. The boy excitedly tries to explain what a big fish he has caught and how difficult it was to land it, but his angry father yells at him to “take it the hell out of the kitchen and throw it in the goddamn garbage.”
Outside, doing as he is told, the boy looks inside his creel at his catch, now a gelatinous, unrecognizable mass. “I lifted him out,” the boy recounts as the story closes, “I held him. I held that half of him.”

Stephen King’s novel, The Body, is set in1960 in a working class town in Maine, a milieu remarkably similar to that depicted in “Nobody Said Anything.” The Body is the story of four twelve year-olds who embark on a kind of quest, but, as in Carver’s story, the quest has no redeeming objective, and it is carried out by damaged children in a ruined world. The narrative is set in motion as the four young friends learn that a boy their age, Ray Brower, is missing from home and is rumored to be lying dead at the base of a stretch of train tracks a few miles out of town. It is summer and the boys are free of school. One of the boys’ parents is criminally abusive, and the parents of the other three are inattentive enough that the boys are able to devise a ruse in which they will pretend to be sleeping overnight together in a tent while they go off in search of the missing boy’s body.
The boys’ stated mission is to find and possibly report the location of the body to the authorities, thereby gaining a kind of bragging rights, but the deeper motive seems to be the morbid fascination of beholding an actual corpse. Along the way, the friends face many obstacles and dangers, but any bracing sense of adventure in the outing is overwhelmed by the unrelieved ugliness of the world and people they encounter—and the ugliness the boys have already begun to incorporate in the conduct of their own lives. They have managed to create a world unto themselves, but it is no secret garden or Neverland. Their improvised clubhouse is, in Gordie’s words “a good place to smoke cigarettes and look at girly books.” Like Carver’s boy narrator, King’s twelve-year-olds are tough-minded and foul-mouthed; one of them, the brutally abused Teddy, is psychologically damaged beyond repair. In their banter they address one another as “you four-eyed pile of shit,” invite one another to “fuck your hand, man.” (297-98) They encounter no humane or accomplished adult. As they attempt to buy provisions for their journey, the grocer tries to cheat them at the counter. The narrator, untroubled by any sense of incivility or disrespect, shouts “Fuck you!” as he runs out of the store. Having trespassed over the fence of a junkyard in order to drink from a water pump, one of the boys finds himself on the forbidden side as the proprietor and his allegedly vicious dog approach. When the boy successfully regains the safe side of the fence, he lingers to taunt the proprietor’s dog—“Kiss my ass, Choppie! Kiss my ass! Bite shit!”—and then the proprietor, calling him “fat ass,” “lard-bucket.” When the proprietor cruelly answers the boy’s taunts, the ugliness of the boy’s invective intensifies: “YOUR MOTHER BLOWS DEAD RATS! I’LL KILL YOU, YOU FUCKING COCKSUCKER!” (348)
Gordie narrates The Body from the perspective of his thirties, looking back. He is, like the novel’s author, Stephen King, a writer; moreover he is a writer who has written some of King’s published stories and books. It is by no means clear whether the narrator/author is celebrating the near-feral antics of his principals or whether he is holding them up for concern. The boys go on to face many dangers. Following the rail tracks over a bridge, they are surprised by the rapid approach of a train and must run for their lives. Camping that night by a fire, Gordie entertains the others by telling a yarn about a fat and cruelly teased boy named David Hogan, whom his townsmen call Lard Ass. He enters a pie eating contest, to the mockery and delight of those who come to watch. As he is about to win the contest, he vomits copiously over the other contestants who in turn become ill, resulting in a vomitous chain reaction and, presumably, a kind of justice. The next day the boys go swimming to get some relief from the intense heat and find themselves covered with leeches. To his horror Gordie finds a leech has attached itself to his scrotum. He asks for help from the other boys, but they are too squeamish. Fearful and shaking with tears, he manages to detach the leech which bursts bloodily into his hands.
At length the spent boys spot the body of Ray Brower lying partly submerged in water at the base of the tracks. Gordie notes in exhaustive detail the position and condition of the body. He speculates with precision how the collision must have propelled the body to the spot where it came to rest, how the impact had lifted the boy out of his shoes. Where some kind of catharsis or revelation might be expected, there is nothing—beyond the realization that the boy was indeed dead. “That finally rammed it all the way home for me,” Gordie muses. “The kid was dead. The kid wasn’t sick, the kid wasn’t sleeping. The kid wasn’t going to get up in the morning anymore…The kid was dead; stone dead.” (408).
The dreary quest of the boy who went fishing in Carver’s story resulted in an unviewably grotesque prize: not a fish, but a mangled wreck of a fish. The quest of the four twelve-year-olds in The Body results in nothing at all. Four living boys seek and find a dead one. In their speech and in their actions the boys already bear the mark of the debased culture in which they are suspended, and on that very account the narrator/author seems to want to exonerate them, even commend them to our affection. This intention is made even more stridently in the action that follows the discovery of Ray Brower’s corpse. Soon after the boys arrive on the scene, they are confronted by a menacing band of teenagers who had hoped to discover the body themselves. The older boys, including one of the twelve-year-olds’ older brother, threaten the younger ones menacingly. In the ensuing showdown, Gordie defiantly stands his ground. He tells the boy threatening him to “suck my fat one, you cheap dime store hood.” One of the other younger boys has smuggled his father’s pistol out of the house and threatens to shoot the older boys if they advance. The teenagers back off, although later they will exact vicious physical revenge.
When Stephen King first published The Body, he included a subtitle: The Loss of Innocence. Yet there is no loss of innocence narrated in the tale. The boys have already lost innocence when they enter the story. Their debased language, the unacknowledged cruelty and insensitivity revealed in their “victorious” encounters with the older boys and adults, even the stories they tell for delight reveal how far they have come from the redemptive spirit of the puer aeternus. The boys talk the talk and think the thoughts of failed and bitter men.
Nothing like the lilt and exuberance of Peter Pan can possibly “break through” into the dispirited, gritty world of Carver’s story and King’s novel. Those stories along with the profusion of kindred stories that have followed represent a kind of epitaph to boy-spirit. Barrie began Peter Pan with the assertion that every boy, except one, grows up. As long as there is one, and he is known, boy-spirit might live on to invigorate all that it touches. At the conclusion of The Body, Gordie, now grown to manhood, reveals that the three fellow travelers of his boyhood have all died young. No boy has grown up, except one. That one is the writer, the one left to tell the tale, and the tale is that if a boy sets off to find himself in the world as it is, he will find a dead boy.