Code Name Verity

Code Name Verity

by

Elizabeth Wein

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Themes and Colors
Friendship Theme Icon
War, Women, and Gender Roles Theme Icon
The Horrors of War Theme Icon
Resistance and Courage Theme Icon
Storytelling Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Code Name Verity, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Friendship Theme Icon

Code Name Verity tells the story of Maddie, a British female pilot during World War II, and her best friend Julie, who works as a spy and is captured by the Nazis in the fictional town of Ormaie, France. The book is told in two parts: the first is written by Julie, who has made a deal with her Nazi captors and is sharing British military secrets with them—in the form of the story of her and Maddie’s friendship—in exchange for more time alive. The second half is Maddie’s written account of what happens in the few months after she and Julie crash-land in France. Eventually, after Maddie kills Julie to save her from further torture by the Nazis, Maddie gets ahold of the story Julie wrote for her captors. Maddie discovers that Julie’s account is actually coded instructions to the Resistance for how to blow up the local Gestapo (Nazi secret police) headquarters. But beyond this, Maddie takes Julie’s story as a testament to the strength of their bond, since Julie chose to embed her instructions within the story of their friendship. Through the way Maddie and Julie cherish their relationship and rely on it for strength and comfort, Code Name Verity suggests that close, intimate friendships are capable of sustaining people through traumatic experiences. Such friendships can also motivate people to do the right thing, especially when it’s difficult.

Close friendships, the novel shows, can be important to helping people succeed professionally. Maddie, for instance, only becomes a pilot and gets the jobs she does flying planes during World War II thanks to her friendship with Dympna Wythenshawe, one of the only female pilots and flight instructors in England. Dympna and Maddie’s friendship is never particularly intimate, but Dympna fully believes in Maddie’s abilities as a pilot and is instrumental in helping Maddie achieve her dreams of flying. Jamie’s eventual job flying for Special Duties also arises out of his friendship with Maddie: just as Dympna referred Maddie to better positions, Maddie does the same for Jamie. In both cases, personal relationships that the characters form help them succeed. Maddie and Julie’s friendship also helps them professionally. They attract the attention of the Machiavellian English Intelligence Officer (who oversees the SOE and trains Julie to be a spy) after Maddie attempts to teach Julie to navigate, and the two spend an afternoon crisscrossing the countryside, with Julie pretending to be a Nazi spy. When they finally arrive at the pub, another officer remarks that the women “work well together,” and Julie credits this afternoon—and her friendship with Maddie—to her eventually becoming an actual spy.

More than this, though, Code Name Verity portrays friendship as a sustaining, life-saving force when a person is in trouble. Importantly, Julie is an extremely unreliable narrator in her account—many of the facts and names she references are intentionally wrong, so as to confuse her Gestapo readers. But it nonetheless seems genuine when she writes that what is keeping her going as she suffers torture and starvation is the knowledge that even if she dies, Maddie will live on. She means this literally at first, and then, when Julie sees photographs of Maddie’s faked death (and believes Maddie is actually dead), she’s motivated to continue her account as a way of keeping Maddie’s memory alive. But while Maddie’s supposed death doesn’t entirely do away with Julie’s will to live, Julie nevertheless feels far more alone—and more frightened—believing that her best friend is only a memory. While Maddie is stranded in France, she, too, takes solace in the knowledge that Julie is still alive and fighting. Indeed, Maddie notes at various points that what’s keeping her going and what helps her be brave is her drive to rescue her friend. Her own life, Maddie suggests, is far less interesting or meaningful—what matters is being able to help someone she loves.

And the women’s choices to value the other’s life over their own supports the novel’s insistence that friendship can help motivate people to do the right thing, even when doing so is extremely difficult. When Maddie knows she’s doing things to protect or try to rescue Julie—such as making Julie jump out of a broken plane before trying to land it so as to not kill Julie, or conquering her fears of ordering in a French café so she can meet up with Engel, a Nazi woman trying to help Julie from inside the Gestapo headquarters—these things aren’t so scary. And earlier in the novel, when Maddie and Julie have to work together to guide a lost German pilot to the ground so the British can imprison him, or when they figure out together how to use an antiaircraft gun, they find these things aren’t so hard when they work together to accomplish their tasks. This idea plays out most clearly on the night that the Resistance plans to rescue Julie (and hopefully, other prisoners) from the Nazis. Having already shot two male prisoners in the groin and each elbow, Nazi guards prepare to do the same thing to Julie—but Julie, realizing that Maddie is one of the Resistance fighters around her, shouts, “Kiss me, Hardy!” (Admiral Lord Nelson’s alleged last words at the Battle of Trafalgar). Maddie realizes that Julie is asking her to shoot and kill her to save her from the Nazis’ torture. And knowing this, Maddie is able to follow through with Julie’s request. Killing her best friend is absolutely difficult—but though Maddie fears she’ll be tried for murder, she never questions whether she did the right thing. She killed Julie, but Maddie also knows that she saved her friend from yet more senseless, cruel torture. Friendship, the novel shows, is a unique force that not only provides comfort and support during difficult times—it also makes those difficult times, and difficult actions, easier to bear.

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Friendship Quotes in Code Name Verity

Below you will find the important quotes in Code Name Verity related to the theme of Friendship.
Part 1: Ormaie 9.XI.43 JB-S Quotes

“I won’t be flying again, will I? […]”

Dympna stood smoking calmly in the evening sunlight and watched Maddie for a while. Then she said, “There’s going to be air work for girls in this war. You wait. They’re going to need all the pilots they can get fighting for the Royal Air Force. That’ll be the young men, some of them with less training than you’ve got now, Maddie. And that’ll leave the old men, and the women, to deliver new aircraft and carry their messages and taxi their pilots. That’ll be us.”

Related Characters: Maddie Brodatt (speaker), Dympna Wythenshawe (speaker)
Page Number: 29
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 1: Ormaie 11.XI.43 JB-S Quotes

He wanted to know, then, why I was choosing to write about myself in the third person. Do you know, I had not even noticed I was doing it until he asked.

The simple answer is because I am telling the story from Maddie’s point of view, and it would be awkward to introduce another viewpoint character at this point. It is much easier writing about me in the third person than it would be if I tried to tell the story from my own point of view. I can avoid all my old thoughts and feelings. It’s a superficial way to write about myself. I don’t have to take myself seriously—or, well, only as seriously as Maddie takes me.

Related Characters: Julie/The Narrator/Queenie/Verity (speaker), Maddie Brodatt, SS-Hauptsturmführer von Linden/The Captain, Anna Engel
Page Number: 58
Explanation and Analysis:

It’s like being in love, discovering your best friend.

Related Characters: Julie/The Narrator/Queenie/Verity (speaker), Maddie Brodatt
Page Number: 68
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 1: Ormaie 22.XI.43 JB-S Quotes

She heard a lot of cursing from the front before the pilot pulled himself together and reset his course. Then she heard his sheepish “Thanks, mate.”

Thanks, mate. Maddie hugged herself with pride and pleasure. I’m one of them, she thought. I’m on my way to France. I might as well be operational.

Related Characters: Michael (speaker), Maddie Brodatt, Julie/The Narrator/Queenie/Verity
Page Number: 156
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 1: Ormaie 28.XI.43 JB-S Quotes

I think her actual last words were “I am glad to die for my country.” I can’t say I honestly believe such sanctimonious twaddle. Kiss me, Hardy. The truth is, I like “Kiss me, Hardy” better. Those are fine last words. Nelson meant that when he said it. Edith Cavell was fooling herself. Nelson was being honest.

So am I.

Related Characters: Julie/The Narrator/Queenie/Verity (speaker), Maddie Brodatt
Page Number: 201
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 2, Section 3 Quotes

Julie has vanished.

It’s true she made her first meeting—Tues. 12 Oct., the day after we got here, but then she simply disappeared as if she’d never been in France. Today’s the 21st. She’s been missing over a week.

I understand now why her mother plays Mrs. Darling and leaves the windows open in her children’s bedrooms when they’re away. As long as you can pretend they might come back, there’s hope. I don’t think there can be anything worse in the world than not knowing what’s happened to your child—not ever knowing.

Related Characters: Maddie Brodatt (speaker), Julie/The Narrator/Queenie/Verity, Jamie, Julie’s Mother
Related Symbols: Peter Pan
Page Number: 227
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 2, Section 6 Quotes

“I know what they’ll say. Silly girl, no brains, too soft, can’t trust a woman to do a man’s work. They only let us fly operational aircraft when they get desperate. And they’re always harder on us when we botch something.” All true, and what I said next was true too, but a bit petty—“You even get to keep your BOOTS and mine are BURNT.”

Related Characters: Maddie Brodatt (speaker), Jamie
Related Symbols: Boots
Page Number: 244
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 2, Section 12 Quotes

We were flying low over the long sands at Holy Island, and it was beautiful, but the plane kept trying to climb and I was fighting and fighting to keep it down. Just like the Lysander. Scared and worried and tired all at once, angry at the sky for being so beautiful when we were in danger of crashing. Then Julie, sitting alongside me, said, “Let me help.”

In the dream the Puss Moth had side-by-side dual controls like a Tipsy, and Julie took hold of her own control column and gently pushed the nose forward, and suddenly we were flying the plane together.

All the pressure was gone. Nothing to be afraid of, nothing to battle against, just the two of us flying together, flying the plane together, side by side in the gold sky.

Related Characters: Maddie Brodatt (speaker), Julie/The Narrator/Queenie/Verity
Page Number: 264
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 2, Section 13 Quotes

Because that’s what it’s like, schoolmates being guillotined as spies. I didn’t understand before—really didn’t understand. Being a kid and worrying that a bomb might kill you is terrible. But being a kid and worrying that the police might cut your head off is something else entirely. I haven’t words for it. Every fresh broken horror is something I just didn’t understand until I came here.

Related Characters: Maddie Brodatt (speaker), Julie/The Narrator/Queenie/Verity, SS-Hauptsturmführer von Linden/The Captain, Amélie/La Cadette, The French Girl/Marie
Page Number: 265
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 2, Section 17 Quotes

Julie was next.

Suddenly she laughed wildly and gave a shaking yell, her voice high and desperate.

“KISS ME, HARDY! Kiss me, QUICK!”

Turned her face away from me to make it easier.

And I shot her.

I saw her body flinch—the blows knocked her head aside as though she’d been thumped in the face. Then she was gone.

Gone. One moment flying in the green sunlight, then the sky suddenly gray and dark. Out like a candle. Here, then gone.

Related Characters: Maddie Brodatt (speaker), Julie/The Narrator/Queenie/Verity (speaker), Paul, Mitraillette
Page Number: 285
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 2, Section 18 Quotes

Her gardens are full of roses—sprawling, old tangled bushes, quite a few of them autumn-flowering damasks with their last flowers still nodding and drooping in the rain. […] The flowers are sodden and dying in the December rain, but the sturdy bushes are still alive, and will be beautiful someday in the spring, if the German army doesn’t mow them down like the ones in the Ormaie town square.

Related Characters: Maddie Brodatt (speaker), Julie/The Narrator/Queenie/Verity, The Rose-Grower
Related Symbols: Damask Roses
Page Number: 292
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 2, Section 20 Quotes

What’s strange about the whole thing is that although it’s riddled with nonsense, altogether it’s true—Julie’s told our story, mine and hers, our friendship, so truthfully. It is us. We even had the same dream at the same time. How could we have had the same dream at the same time? How something so wonderful and mysterious be true? But it is.

Related Characters: Maddie Brodatt (speaker), Julie/The Narrator/Queenie/Verity, SS-Hauptsturmführer von Linden/The Captain
Page Number: 297
Explanation and Analysis:

And this, even more wonderful and mysterious, is also true: when I read it, when I read what Julie’s written, she is instantly alive again, whole and undamaged. With her words in my mind while I’m reading, she is as real as I am. Gloriously daft, drop-dead charming, full of bookish nonsense and foul language, brave and generous. She’s right here. Afraid and exhausted, alone, but fighting. Flying in silver moonlight in a plane that can’t be landed, stuck in the climb—alive, alive, ALIVE.

Related Characters: Maddie Brodatt (speaker), Julie/The Narrator/Queenie/Verity
Page Number: 297
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 2, Section 22 Quotes

“You never gave any to Julie.”

“Never gave any to Julie!” Engel gave an astonished bark of laughter. “I damn well gave her half my salary in cigarettes, greedy little Scottish savage! She nearly bankrupted me. Smoked her way through all five years of your pilot’s career!”

“She never said! She never even hinted! Not once!”

“What do you think would have happened to her,” Engel said coolly, “if she had written this down? What would have happened to me?”

Related Characters: Maddie Brodatt (speaker), Anna Engel (speaker), Julie/The Narrator/Queenie/Verity, SS-Hauptsturmführer von Linden/The Captain
Page Number: 308
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 2, Section 24 Quotes

“They let us bury everyone at last,” she told me. “Most are up there by the bridge. But I was so angry about those poor girls, those two lovely young girls left lying there in the dirt for four days with the rats and the crows at them! It’s not right. It is not natural. So when we buried the others I had the men bring the girls here—”

Julie is buried in her great-aunt’s rose garden, wrapped in her grandmother’s first Communion veil, and covered in a mound of damask roses.

Related Characters: The Rose-Grower (speaker), Maddie Brodatt, Julie/The Narrator/Queenie/Verity
Related Symbols: Damask Roses
Page Number: 319
Explanation and Analysis: