Reading Journal - The Body #2

To arrange, the Body reminds us of youth and innocence we once had that now all gone. We can feel universal nostalgic across generations by delegately expressed pre-teen boys' dialogues and sensitively touching emotional statements. As we watch them fall from innocence, we feel somehow sympathized of the process we also have walked through. As Stephen King illuminates all the emotional hurt characters, he offers us a chance to look on every each background tied up to as one. However, in the end, it's all a story of a writer's writing journey that has diminished and shraveled since exposed to the language. Consequently, we'll have to make up the diminished part as we translate the context into language in our heart.

The four boys, trying to take off the lable which the society forcefully tagged them, gathered around and measure each other's value and assure that they're alive. They have gathered in the tree house not due to any external force but by the core sense of friends. They knew each other and understood one another. A friendship that doesn't have to be calculated. As we age and learn to adapt in society, the chance to get those friendship sharply decreases-or might even be impossible to have. Gordie, who lost precious brother, looks out for some care from their parents; especially from his father, who naver shows any approvance for Gordie. Fornuately, Gordie meets Chris who can see through Gordie's talent and who sincerely tries hard to keep it. But the relation between the two boys varies in movie and the novel.

In the movie stand by me focuses more on the character Gordie, as a tragic hero, such that he holds the gun up bravely toward the Ace gang. In the novel, Gordie is more like a narrator and Chris gets the focus of tragic hero. But in both ways, we could feel the unexpressed movement beyond the scenes. They could put their mind on each other without any suspense. I was so sad that I can't have a friend like this indeed. Is it too late to have one like that or is it the world to blame? The line, "I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, did you? (King, p.341)", deeply hurts my heart.

The friendship with Vern and Teddy vanished as their innocence peeled off. However, Chris and Gordie developed and kept their friendship as the innocence itself; they have outgrown innocence with sense of living and they got back to their innocence by meeting each other. They knew how to keep themselves cognitivie of threshold-all the pain and adventure. Those memories must have been the energy for them to keep strong in the cold winter of sadness. "Friends come in and out of your life like busboys in a restaurant, did you ever notice that? But when I think of that dream, the corpses under the water pulling implacably at my legs, it seems right that it should be that way (p.432)." shows how truthful they are to each other's respect of life.

Those boys get through the threshold of becoming an adult by facing death, a situation of frighten, and a place where their parents can't intervene. Additionally, the adventure under the name of "looking for a dead body" made them confront death and become honest to the accidentality, unfairness of world. The story couldn't directly tell us how they've changed or their words changed since it is expressless. However, we could see as they give up to possess the dead body "Not in this way." The season of autumm symbolizes harvest and preparation for a long winter. The fall from innocence-a threshold of adult-feels similar with the mood of autumm as the leaves fall and everything restults out for the next step.

Reading all the long story, I felt that I am not done crossing the threshold. I am still struggling between my late end of teenage and becoming an adult. I rather questioned my self how my threshold have been until now. I am now challenging on a long adventure how to form my innocence and keep it. Step by step, I am getting near to the level of adult and my life of mortaility. But still, I am young enough to keep my own value.