This is my third reading journal after reading King’s stories. I have finished reading ‘The Body’, and I was deeply impressed at how Stephen King mixed different themes together to form this masterpiece.
Four boys keep mentioning in the book that friends drag others down. What does this mean? This means that if you hang around with wrong friends, the community might downgrade you. That is what happened to Gordon in ‘The Body’. As Gordon always hung around with Chris, Teddy, and Vern who all have notorious family backgrounds, the community views him as a lower class.
Chris comes from an illiterate family, so the townspeople scoff at him whenever he talks about going to college. People believe that, because Chris’s family received poor education, Chris should also remain illiterate. In addition, Chris is regarded as a thief by people including Gordon’s dad, because he took the milk money from school and tried to use it for his own good. Even though he returned it, the old lady Simons used it to buy her own skirt and Chris was blamed. For Vern, his elder brothers are real juvenile delinquents, so they expect the same from Vern. Teddy’s dad is a looney, and he almost burned Teddy’s ears off and made him deaf.
As Gordie always hangs around with ‘a thief and two feebs’ according to Gordie’s father, even his own parents refuse him. Gordie is always compared with his elder brother Dennis who passed away, because Dennis had proper friends and even went to college. After Dennis died, Gordon’s mom pretends that Gordon is invisible; she pretends not to see him, and acts as if Gordie does not exist.
I think this kind of phenomenon happened to me many times before too. When I was in the elementary school, there were some outsiders who did not have a single friend. People pushed them away, casting them out in every way they could. And whenever someone accosted them and started talking, even that guy’s best friends turned his back on him. Then, he becomes an outsider too. No one dared to approach these outsiders, afraid that they might be left out too from the group too.
After reading ‘The Body’, I began to realize how sheepish, how cowardly I was. For Gordon, he decides to hang around with Chris, Teddy and Vern no matter what the townspeople says as he is not afraid of them. For me, I cared more about the eyes of the society rather than my own will, and that is what stopped me from hanging around with these friends.
Good post. I am well familiar with the "wongta" phenomenon in Korea, and witnessed it all too often while I was teaching in elementary schools in Seoul. Sometimes I could see why a certain student was an outcast, but sometimes there seemed to be no reason for it at all. The outcast was every bit as intelligent, good looking, and friendly as everyone, but for some reason they were the unlucky one. Every classroom in the world has this problem to some extent, but I'm glad that KMLA sort of doesn't.
ReplyDeleteNice Reading Journal.