Code Name Verity

Code Name Verity

by

Elizabeth Wein

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Resistance and Courage Theme Analysis

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.
Resistance and Courage Theme Icon

As Maddie and Julie become involved in the British war effort during World War II, both women have to decide what it means to be brave and courageous in their respective lines of work. Maddie, for instance, doesn’t think of herself as brave when she’s tasked with flying damaged planes (without flight instruments) around England. But she finds her friend Julie’s work as a spy and interrogator terrifying, as Julie constantly has to assume different personas and use her charm to convince Nazis to give up their secrets. And for her part, Julie is afraid of heights and so finds Maddie’s job intimidating. However, the novel’s definition of what’s brave and what isn’t becomes fuzzier when the Gestapo (Nazi secret police) capture Julie in France, and Julie begins to write an account of her friendship with Maddie for her captors while Maddie joins the French Resistance movement nearby. Julie is ostensibly giving up British military secrets, so as she writes, she insists she’s not brave—she was tortured and has given into the Nazis, and her fellow French and English prisoners detest her for not being more courageous. After her death, though, when Maddie reads Julie’s account, Maddie discovers that Julie’s insistence she wasn’t brave was a total front: Julie’s written story includes instructions for the Resistance to blow up the Ormaie Gestapo headquarters; her “giving in” was just another persona Julie embodied. Through Julie’s actions, and through the actions of other characters that Maddie meets, the novel suggests that bravery and resistance don’t only look one way. Rather, what constitutes bravery—and how people resist things they don’t believe in—necessarily changes given the circumstances.

At first, both Julie and Maddie think of bravery as simply doing things that the other person finds dangerous and scary. Maddie, for instance, is terrified when she and Julie find themselves running across their base during an air raid and are called to help injured antiaircraft gunners. Maddie is terrified of guns and bombs (and violence more generally), so the whole experience is traumatic for her in a way that it’s not for Julie, who grew up shooting. Similarly, Julie is afraid of heights, so she’s in awe that Maddie is a pilot—but to Maddie, flying planes is just an extension of her love of mechanics. Though the two friends differ in some ways, they have the same initial definition of bravery: it’s doing whatever they’re afraid of, and it’s obvious when they or someone else has been brave. They also suggest that it’s easy to identify when someone isn’t being brave, as that person either takes the easy way out to avoid doing whatever scares them or is too terrified to function (as Maddie almost is when helping the gunners).

However, as the novel progresses, Maddie and Julie suggest that it’s actually more common for bravery to go unnoticed, especially in the context of their involvement in World War II. Julie is the clearest example of bravery that, for weeks, goes unnoticed. She begins her account in captivity ostensibly to give the Ormaie Gestapo information about the British war effort, which elicits her fellow prisoners’ scorn. While they consistently refuse to speak as von Linden tortures them, they see Julie as a traitor who’s conspiring with the Nazis. And it’s not until Maddie gets ahold of Julie’s account, days after Julie’s death, that she learns the truth: that Julie told the Nazis nothing of use and actually used the account to give the Resistance instructions to blow up the Gestapo’s headquarters. Similarly, Anna Engel and Georgia Penn’s actions don’t seem brave—until it becomes clear late in the novel that both were secretly helping Julie. To read Julie’s account and take it as fact, Engel is perhaps a sympathetic figure because of the sexism she endures, but she’s still in league with the Nazis and complicit in torturing Julie. But Maddie discovers that Engel actually helped Julie pass on her message to the Resistance, at great personal risk. Penn, for her part, is supposedly a Nazi sympathizer who uses her radio program to try to make the Nazis look good to Americans—but really, she’s a double agent who uses her job to find captured Allies like Julie. Again and again, Maddie is shocked at these small acts of bravery that she witnesses in France that, to most people, would be imperceptible. It’s humbling, she suggests, to come across so many people who, in a variety of ways, put themselves in harm’s way to fight the Nazis. And this forms one of the novel’s most important lessons: that while being brave is almost never easy, it’s worth it to support a cause—or person—one loves and believes in.

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Resistance and Courage Quotes in Code Name Verity

Below you will find the important quotes in Code Name Verity related to the theme of Resistance and Courage.
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:
Part 1: Ormaie 18.XI.43 JB-S Quotes

9) Not being able to finish my story.

10) Also of finishing it.

I am no longer afraid of getting old. Indeed I can’t believe I ever said anything so stupid. So childish. So offensive and arrogant.

But mainly, so very, very stupid. I desperately want to grow old.

Related Characters: Julie/The Narrator/Queenie/Verity (speaker), Maddie Brodatt
Related Symbols: Peter Pan
Page Number: 114
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 1: Ormaie 20.XI.43 JB-S Quotes

“Your accent is frightful,” I answered, also in French. “Would you repeat that in English?”

She did—taking no insult, very serious, through a pall of smoke.

“I’m looking for verity.”

It’s a bloody good thing von Linden let me have that cigarette, because otherwise I don’t know how I’d have managed to conceal that every one of us was dealing out her own DAMNED PACK OF LIES.

Related Characters: Julie/The Narrator/Queenie/Verity (speaker), Georgia Penn (speaker), Maddie Brodatt, SS-Hauptsturmführer von Linden/The Captain, Anna Engel
Page Number: 131
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 11 Quotes

“She showed me,” Penn said. “She was pretty clear about it. Adjusted her scarf as soon as we’d shaken hands—gave me a good look. Ugly row of narrow triangular burns across her throat and collarbone, just beginning to heal. It looked like it had been done with a soldering iron. More of the same all along the insides of her wrists. She was very clever about showing me, cool as you please, no drama about it.”

Related Characters: Georgia Penn (speaker), Maddie Brodatt, Julie/The Narrator/Queenie/Verity, SS-Hauptsturmführer von Linden/The Captain, Mitraillette
Page Number: 261
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 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:
Part 2, Section 21 Quotes

There’s more—I know there’s more—Engel’s underlined all the instructions in red—red’s her color, Julie said. The pages are numbered and dated in red too. Julie mentioned Engel had to number the pages. They’ve created it between them, Julia Beaufort-Stuart and Anna Engel, and they’ve given it to me to use—the code’s not in order, doesn’t need to be. No wonder she was so determined to finish it—

Related Characters: Maddie Brodatt (speaker), Julie/The Narrator/Queenie/Verity, Anna Engel
Page Number: 298
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: