The Body Reading Response 1: Semi-Teens

           People generally say that the teenage years are the most turbulent of the entire life of a person. Teenagers, stuck somewhere between childhood and maturity, can indeed be a confused group of people in need of guidance. However, based on many things including my personal experience, the few years before teenage life can also be a period of inner conflict and instability.  Caught in the threshold between childhood and the teens, the “semi-teens” of ages around 11 to 14 find themselves without the degree of freedom or maturity that is allowed to teenagers, while slowly losing the innocence and naivety that they had as children. Thus the semi-teens, now on the verge of puberty, find themselves alone and difficult to fit in either physically or mentally with any other group in society.

           The Body, a novella by Stephen King features four such semi-teens. Gordie, Chris, Teddy, and Vern are all boys slightly too old to be called children yet definitely younger than the tough teenagers around them. They all come from different families and backgrounds, and each has his own problems that continuously haunt him.

           The Body features Gordie narrating, in retrospect, an adventure the four boys had. Early parts of the novel show how this adventure—which involves walking into the woods in order to find the dead body of a boy—began; Vern secretly heard of the body’s existence from a conversation between his older, punk brother and one of his delinquent friends. When Vern tells his three friends, they almost immediately decide to set off on a journey to find it. The first 30 pages show the background to, and preparation for, this trip.

           So far, the story was enjoyable because of the simple fact that I could relate to the characters, however typical that may sound. The boys are all around the age of 12 or 13; an age that I myself was only a few years ago. The way the author develops the main characters, the way the characters think and act, seems very familiar because it is not that different from the way my friends and I used to think and act not a long time ago. The actions that the boys make, starting with the idea of spontaneously deciding to search for a dead body with the reward of local fame in mind, all are things that a younger me would not have hesitated to do also. Even the most minor or petty things, such as Vern’s never ending search for his penny jar, all contribute to making the characters more realistic and letting the readers reminisce their own life during that period.

           However, Stephen King also portrays the inner conflict in the boys well. The boys each have their own problems; Gordie, the narrator, especially, has to deal with the death of his older brother and the subsequent disregard for him of his parents. When dealing with such problems, Gordie and the other boys cannot enjoy the blind, innocent, optimism of childhood nor the mature calmness of an older person. Ambiguously stuck somewhere in the middle, they do their best to manage and deal with their problems within the limitations they have. Stephen King illustrates this process in a way that draws the sympathy and understanding of the readers.

           Stephen King stated in interviews that he drew from his own experience in his young years when writing the story. So far in the story, we can see that he did so in a way that enables the audience to go back to their own childhood to agree and sympathize with the characters, and to look forward to the rest of the book.