The Body Study Guide

Stephen King was born to middle class parents in Maine shortly after the end of World War II. His father left the family when King was two, after which his mother raised him and his older brother on her own. The family lived in many places during the early years of his life but eventually settled in Durham, Maine, when King was 11. He attended the University of Maine on scholarship, planning to become a teacher. He sold his first short story when he was still in college and continued to write even after he found work as a high school English teacher. He published his debut novel, Carrie, in 1974, and its immediate success allowed him to quit teaching and pursue writing full time. Known for his prolific horror stories, King has also dabbled in suspense, science fiction, and historical fiction. His life’s work includes in excess of 60 novels and 200 short stories, and more than 60 of his works have been turned into films. He and his wife met in college and raised their three children in Maine, where King and his wife still live.

Gordie Lechance and his friends are all Baby Boomers, born in the aftermath of World War II—Teddy’s father even served in the Army and stormed the beaches of Normandy. In the United States, the post-war years generally coincided with economic growth and social stability, although as The Body dramatizes, these benefits weren’t universal. It was a time of shifting cultural mores, with an especially sharp divide between the values of the youth and their parents which contributed to a sense of cultural alienation among young people. Their generation faced its own war, too: Vietnam. In the book, Gordie’s older brother Dennis dies at Basic Training, presumably having been drafted to fight in Vietnam. Gordie mentions his own service in passing, as well as Teddy’s attempt to enlist. Given his interest in becoming a writer (opposed to Teddy, who wanted to become a soldier), it’s likely that Gordie was one of the 2.2 million young men drafted to serve, frequently against their will. The Vietnam War was a long-running civil conflict between the communist North Vietnam (supported by the U.S.S.R. and China) and South Vietnam (supported by the United States and its democratic allies). The longest and bloodiest of the Cold War’s proxy conflicts, the Vietnam War cost the lives of more than 58,000 American troops.

In the summer of 1960, Gordie and his friends set out to find a dead body. Their journey there and back recalls other quest stories going all the way back to Homer’s Odyssey. More modern examples include J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937), Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist (1988), and series like Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians (published 2005-2009). The Body also offers a coming-of-age tale as Gordie and his friends face their own mortality and try to figure out how to live with the uncomfortable truths of life. Other examples in this genre are J.D. Salinger’s 1951 The Catcher in the Rye, which sees Holden Caulfield struggling to deal with the death of his brother and his own impending sense of mortality—just like Gordie—and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1884). Finally, The Body is just one of Stephen King’s many works set in and around the fictious town of Castle Rock, Maine. Other books that share its setting (and some of its characters) include The Dead Zone (1979), Cujo (1981), and Needful Things (1991).