Late review ! : The Body

Reviews



The Body - by Stephen King

Frankly saying, I started with original text but read Korean interpreted version from the middle of the story and then finished again with original text… One interesting point is that Korean version’s sentence structure was identical to its original English version! It was quite awkward but fresh because grammatical order of Korean and English is directly opposite. Yet because Korean version was made a direct translation of the English text, it was easy to match each part of Korean version book with its original version.

From the start to the end, I thought “The Body” was well written story. In lead-in part of the story, Stephen King gives us brief account of each character’s anecdote. Although anecdotes have not been dealt thoroughly, by making introduction as short as possible, flow of the story became much faster and helped me to focus more on each of the characters. It is a truly incredible ability of writer to allude to readers that there’s no time to sentimentalize over idle stories through arrangement of words and sentences. Furthermore, each anecdotes pops out when it seems like there should be some kind of explanation in the book. Switching between short stories within the big frame of the story was so natural that they all seemed like “real” part of the story. Especially the part where Gordie introduces his college work when he sentimentalizes over his brother Dennis, it really looked like a one story although there was no transition words or some other kinds of tools to make it look like one story. For me, a student who even struggles with transition between SAT essay paragraphs, it is such a desirable ability to have.

When the story comes to an ending part, it strangely becomes descriptive. What we see in the main part of the story where Gordie and his friends start there miniature journey to find “the Body” is overall description about outside world rather than Gordie, Chris, Teddy, Vern themselves. What we remember instantly when asked about the four kids’ journey is some big “events” like train chasing down Gordie and Vern on the bridge. While the main journey part was mainly written and described based on big events, Stephen King changes his way of writing from “event-centered” to “character-centered” at the last part of the story. Perhaps this kind of style and organization of the story made the overall story neater through narrowing down the object that the author is describing in the book. Thus, every little behavior of the boys shows little breakups between them which creates melancholic ambience; but at the same time Gordie describes his town after journey like this: “We walked a block or so without talking. Castle Rock was awesomely quiet in the day’s first light, and I felt an almost holy tiredness-is-slipping-away sort of feeling... We walked another block in silence” which creates warm and yielding mood that seemed to make two boys, Gordie, Chris closer through the silence.



Although “The Body” was classified as a horror story by most of the people, I would like to say it is “tempered” horror story which makes readers to think once more about themselves and people around them. Through King’s amazing and compelling sentences, “The Body” provided me a great time of introspection.