The Revenge of Lard-Ass Hogan from "Stand By Me" 1986
Although David Copperfield faces abandonment, loneliness, isolation and the deaths of loved ones during the formative years of his life, he manages to grow into an emotionally and spiritually mature adult. As readers, we observe David’s transformation through the choices he makes in his early life (a poorly planned marriage to the fickle and unsuitable Dora; his job as a law clerk), whereas the choices of his later life are those of someone who has acquired a sense of self (his second marriage to the likeminded Agnes; his vocation as writer). Since Dickens so pointedly portrays David as a character who gains self-awareness through negative personal experiences, biographers of the author frequently note the many similar experiences in Dickens’s own life.[1] The way in which Dickens uses death to bring his characters to such profound epiphanies is so strong that it echoes throughout succeeding literature, firmly entering twentieth and twenty-first century-consciousness. Dickens draws on powerful archetypal themes in his writing, and this technique enables his audience to connect with his characters through their own personal memories of loss. This use of death as a catalyst for inner growth also can be seen in works of the modern American horror writer, Stephen King. His short story “The Body” is concerned with the loss of innocence and is strikingly similar to David Copperfield in multiple ways, but King’s work skirts a mere modernization of Dickens’s plot. For the protagonists of these two tales, friends supplant the nuclear family of childhood that is missing for both main characters. Through the isolation of their home lives and their early experiences of death, both protagonists subvert their predicted futures of a failed adulthood, and both are able to prosper. This paper aims to show that Dickens’s writing profoundly influenced the attitudes held by modern society about human relationships and the very process of living itself, pointing out mind-sets that contemporary writers still express today.
Dickens and King share various biographical parallels: both came from humble origins, began their careers under pseudonyms (Dickens as Boz and King as Richard Bachman), and were forced at an early age to deal with feelings of abandonment. Having been infamously put to work by his parents at a blackening factory after his father’s incarceration for debt, Dickens felt a sense of horror and shock when his mother aimed to send him back to the factory after his father’s release.[2] While Charles worked at the factory, his sister Fanny was allowed to continue her musical instruction, and this fact no doubt buried within him a deep uneasiness as to where he stood in the family. When King was two, his father left the house to buy a pack of cigarettes and never returned. King was quoted in a 1988 interview as saying, “I have a sense of injustice that came, I think…My mother was a single parent…she went through a lot of menial jobs. We were the little people…A lot of that injustice stayed. It stuck with me.”[3] In addition to the works of H. P. Lovecraft and William Faulkner, King cites Dickens’s Bleak House as one of his favourite books.[4] Throughout “The Body,” he includes many references to the canon of great literature, references that prove his literary awareness. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, a general reference to Algernon Blackwood’s works, “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner” by Coleridge and even Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities are all cited by Gordie in his narrative (King 409, 510, 534, and 489). Gordie tells one of his stories to his friends while they are on their journey. This tale later becomes “The Revenge of Lard Ass Hogan,” published by the adult Gordon Lachance in 1975. In this story-within-a-story, an obese teenager enters a pie-eating contest to wreak vengeance on his tormentors (King 489). In Gordie’s tale, the contestant comes up to the stage, his “hands bound behind him and his shirtfront open, like Sidney Carton [sic] on his way to the guillotine” (King 489). From this description, we can see to what extent King has been influenced by the literary greats who came before him. As Dickens expelled his inner demons with David Copperfield, it can be said that King did the same with his most autobiographical work, “The Body.”[5] Each of these two stories is narrated by an adult character who looks back on his adolescence, examining to what extent the isolation of a broken home stunted him and how the love he felt for his friends saved him.
Gordie Lachance’s family members have become figurative zombies after the death of his older brother Dennis. David Copperfield’s family (consisting only of his mother and Clara Peggotty) has been infiltrated by the cuckoo birds that are the Murdstones: a stepfather and his sister who think of David as a nuisance in need of being conquered. The state of becoming invisible to families that should be loving drives both boys to make a family of their friends, for better or for worse, while it also inflicts a sense of powerlessness on the protagonists. After Murdstone marries Clara Copperfield, David states that he feels like a “blank space” that is simultaneously “overlooked [and in] everybody’s way” (Dickens 145). Here we see the beginning of David’s lack of power. Dickens portrays the torment wreaked upon a child by invisibility and loneliness with David’s description of his condition: to the boy, it seems like a “daymare” (144). David goes on to say, “What meals I had in silence and embarrassment, always feeling that there were a knife and fork too many, and those mine; an appetite too many, and that mine; a plate and chair too many, and those mine; a somebody too many, and that I!” (Dickens 144). The things that belong to the child are here highlighted as the problem. With David’s lonely chair crowding the scene, the Dickensian reader recalls Tiny Tim’s stool in A Christmas Carol. This stool sits next to Bob Cratchit’s chair when the Ghost of Christmas Present shows Scrooge the family’s humble but happy dwelling. In Scrooge’s later vision of the future, the stool is missing from the Cratchit household. This absence of Tiny Tim’s only possession therefore signifies his death. Although the child’s belongings in these two Dickensian narratives have different meanings to their respective families, the sense that the child is connected to his things and that the families can use such belongings to express their feelings about the child is established. At this juncture, instead of Murdstone’s declaration that he wishes David would disappear, he and Jane Murdstone make David feel as though the space the boy physically occupies is the issue in question.
The depth to which David is forced to think of himself as an unimportant outsider to those who should love him unconditionally is revisited with Gordie’s relationship to his parents. Gordie refers to himself as the “Invisible Boy” in his household after the death of his brother Dennis (King 392, author’s capitalization). In this case, even before his brother’s death, Gordie is never quite recognized as a valuable member of his family. The boy demonstrates this past ambivalence on the part of his parents by stating that they “were always a little too impressed with him [Dennis] to burden him with the care of his kid brother” (King 410). Unlike Dennis, Gordie is not an adept physical athlete. He is instead a sensitive writer, someone who absorbs the action and emotion around him and turns it into art. This ability of Gordie’s is also said to have been one of King’s as a youth, and with its inclusion here, we see another biographical allusion.[6] Ten years younger than Dennis, Gordie is physically smaller. For this reason, he is deemed unimportant to the Lachance household, which is dominated by those who are physically big and therefore considered significant. He remembers one of the times that Dennis has taken him along to watch him play a baseball game with his friends. Dennis tells the boy, “‘Go sit over there on the bench, Gordie. Be quiet. Don’t bother anybody.’ I go sit over there on the bench. I am good. I feel impossibly small under the sweet summer clouds. I watch my brother pitch. I don’t bother anybody” (King 410). Again it is the space that the child takes up, even though in Gordie’s narrative it is a very small space, which appears to be the problem. This feeling of taking up space, of being an unwanted intrusion, again unites David and Gordie.
Eventually, both characters find their worst fears actualized: they survive while others around them die. At this point, both are neglected still further, and this in turn forces them to become even more accountable for the space they occupy. After Dennis’s death, Gordie’s parents keep his brother’s bedroom in its original state as a type of time capsule memorial to their son. Gordie says that unless he is sent in there on an errand, he tries to stay away from the room because “it was terrible” (King 412). Gordie’s talent for creating narrative turns Dennis’s room into a boogieman’s chamber where the closet forms the central apex of fear. The boy’s imagination tells him that Dennis, a rotting corpse with blood and brains caked to his shirt, is lying in wait for him in the closet. Gordie visualizes the door slowly opening with Dennis behind it, “his bloody hands hooking into claws…croaking: ‘It should have been you, Gordon. It should have been you’” (King 412, author’s italics). The 1999 BBC miniseries of David Copperfield casts Trevor Eve as Murdstone and adds a line that is hauntingly similar to this aforementioned one, though it should be noted that the line does not appear in the original Dickens text. After Clara and her second son have died, Murdstone drunkenly bursts into David’s room and croaks in a gravelly voice, “You should be dead, not them. Why didn’t He take you instead?” (writ. Adrian Hodges). Since “The Body” was published in 1982, seventeen years prior to this BBC adaption, it is certainly possible that it influenced screenplay writer Adrian Hodges, but without conclusive evidence that Hodges was aware of King, this proves difficult to track. Regardless, it is intriguing to note the ways in which the archetypal feelings of childhood loneliness and isolation presented in Dickens’s novel can be said to have influenced King in his writing of “The Body,” and how this in turn may have served as a further motivation for the translation of David Copperfield into a television format.
David’s solitude makes his friendships with the Peggotty family and the boys at Salem House all the more important to him. Dickens’ portrayal of David as the family outcast causes Steerforth and David’s other
childhood protectors to seem appealing by contrast as they manifest change within the boy’s character. When David first meets Steerforth, the reader is introduced to him with the adult appellation, J. Steerforth. As narrator, David remarks that Steerforth “was very good-looking,” and throughout the novel, he makes many further references to Steerforth’s physiognomy (Dickens 101). Steerforth’s good looks are a comfort to David, who feels lost in the world of ugliness at Salem House and in the world as a whole. Steerforth tends to David’s physical needs by purchasing food on his behalf. When Steerforth produces this food later that evening, the friendship is sealed; he has provided for David. At the end of chapter six, Steerforth himself has decided what kind of friend he will be to David: “I’ll take care of you,” he proclaims (Dickens 105). In this friendship, Steerforth becomes the father that David has longed for and has never known; perhaps this is why David accepts the bond so easily.
Chris Chambers similarly becomes a parental figure for Gordie, pushing him to continue his writing. “‘It’s like God gave you something, all those stories you can make up, and He said, This is what we got for you, kid. Try not to lose it. But kids lose everything unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks are too fucked up to do it then maybe I ought to’” (King 505, author’s italics). Chris and Steerforth both have a self-awareness of their difference to Gordie and David. Though isolated from familial love and invisible at home, Gordie and David have not been broken. They persevere. However, where Steerforth and Chris are concerned, even before much plot development has evolved, the reader senses that we are looking at doomed characters. Both come from broken homes: Steerforth’s has been broken by wealth whereas Chris’s has been torn apart by poverty, but both youths have been impacted on an equally deep level. As a young man, Steerforth confesses to David, “‘I wish with all my soul I had been better guided...I wish with all my soul I could guide myself better!’” (Dickens 384). Chris likewise admits self-defeat to Gordie after confessing that he once stole milk money from school. Feeling guilty about the theft, he had given the money back to an unscrupulous teacher who never turned it in. This teacher then showed up at school a week later with a new skirt, only to use Chris as the scapegoat. Chris claims that he wants to sever ties with his abusive family and leave Castle Rock, Maine. “‘I want to go someplace where nobody knows me and I don’t have any black marks against me before I start. But I don’t know if I can do it’” (King 509). With Chris’s school narrative, King incorporates one of the most shocking Dickensian character types into “The Body,” that of the corrupt adult who takes advantage of a powerless child. In a similar vein, Steerforth and Chris, best friends of the young heroes, represent the archetypal character that must fail in order for the protagonist to succeed. Much like the son who can only take his place as head of the household after the father’s death, Gordie and David cannot transform themselves from boys to men until their protectors depart the scene.
David and Gordie view their best friends in a similarly exalted light. To their eyes, Chris and Steerforth are all-powerful and can do no wrong. Through seeing these characters from Gordie’s and David’s perspectives, we understand the literal descriptions of sight and the figurative uses of vision shared by Dickens and King. David says of Steerforth, “he was a person of great power in my eyes…No veiled future dimly glanced upon him in the moonbeams. There was no shadowy picture of his footsteps, in the garden that I dreamed of walking in all night” (Dickens 105). David understands an inner message that Steerforth is giving in this display of himself, a message with further implications in Steerforth’s later downfall. Already at this young age, Steerforth possesses a sense of his own character and knows his tendency to be wayward. With his appearance, however, he is attempting to convey how he wishes to be seen in the eyes of his friends. Eventually, the message is reiterated verbally to David when Steerforth says, “‘think of me at my best, if circumstances should ever part us’” (Dickens 523). Despite Steerforth’s fickle inner nature, he is beautiful and powerful in the social sphere of Salem House, and therefore he is virtuous in David’s eyes. Even though David’s memories are coloured by the fact that he is looking back upon his feelings prior to Steerforth’s downfall, we can see how these same feelings have worked to build a vision of Steerforth as someone with charisma, a person able to bend the wills of the Salem House authorities to his own. This power holds vast appeal to David, who has lacked control since the introduction of the Murdstones into his life. But David’s shining vision of Steerforth cannot continue when he is made aware of his friend’s contribution to the moral disgrace of Little Em’ly and the consequential breakup of Emily’s and Ham’s engagement. At this point, what David sees and what he hears can no longer coexist.
Dickens foreshadows the deaths of Ham and Steerforth when David meets Ham in Yarmouth prior to Mr. Peggotty’s departure for Australia with Emily. David proclaims that on speaking to Peggotty, he sees on her face that she thinks Ham wishes to meet with him alone. Again, a secret, unspoken message is expressed through the face and understood simply through the act of looking. After David meets Ham in Yarmouth, he has this to say of what he sees in Ham’s departure: “As I looked after his figure, crossing the waste in the moonlight, I saw him turn his face towards a strip of silvery light upon the sea, and pass on, looking at it, until he was a shadow in the distance” (Dickens 887). Can we take this as a recurrence of the “moonbeams” and “shadowy…footsteps” in David’s remembrance of Steerforth at school (Dickens 105)? With both of these examples, David is recalling youthful memories of two friends who enter and exit illusory, liminal spaces. A parallel can be drawn between these two memories, but what this paper aims to demonstrate is the way in which both characters, as portrayed in these actions remembered by David, seem to provide haunting premonitions of their own deaths. Ham looks out to the sea which is lit by an etheric, silver moonlight, then he melts into the shadows, a place where David cannot follow. Of Ham’s and Steerforth’s deaths, Dickens describes little, but instead he builds suspense with Ham’s attempt to rescue a drowning stranger (Steerforth) from the sinking schooner. David has to be held back by the crowd of onlookers as he breaks into near hysterics at Ham’s determination to save this unknown man. To David, even before Ham has gone into the water, he is dead. Ham stands “alone, with the silence of suspended breath behind him, and the storm before” (Dickens 956). Ham is again separated from David (the living) and is literally without breath; it is “behind him” (Dickens 956). Perhaps this is why Dickens does not need to dwell on the scene of Ham’s body as it is pulled back onto the shore? David merely states that Ham was “insensible--dead” (Dickens 957). Before going into the water, Ham has acknowledged his own impending death, even saying to David that perhaps this is his time to die, and if it is, he accepts that fact. Although they express it differently, Ham and Steerforth have an understanding of death, and through his friendships with them, David absorbs this knowledge and uses it to his benefit. David has been marred by death and by the feelings of invisibility that have rendered him powerless. His father, mother, half-brother, and wife Dora already have died when he loses Ham and Steerforth, but he has never been able to come to an understanding of these previous separations.
Until Ham’s and Steerforth’s deaths, David’s consciousness remains at a standstill, and his adult psyche is still undeveloped. Knowing this, readers can attribute his desire for a marriage with the “child-wife” Dora to this emotionally-stunted state (Dickens 774). David wants to grow up (and he therefore chooses marriage), but he picks an inappropriate wife who is not matched to him in emotional depth. However, through seeing Ham’s and Steerforth’s dead bodies, David matures and at last becomes more than his child self. He later marries Agnes, the friend of his youth, who has already matured due to her own life’s circumstances, and his second wife proves to be an ideal marriage partner.
“The Body” recycles this motif of achieving spiritual and emotional growth through the act of viewing a corpse. Gordie and his friends are on an expedition to see the body of a dead kid their age, Ray Brower, a boy from the next town over. They cannot explain their reasons for being so driven to find Ray’s corpse in the woods; they only know that they have to do so. Gordie says, “the fascination of the thing drew us on and kept us walking faster than we had any business doing, in that heat” (King 524).[7] As already established here, Gordie and Chris both come from homes where they feel isolated and invisible. King goes to great lengths to describe the equally appalling and physically abusive domestic lives of the other two boys, Vern and Teddy. King, like Dickens, uses the act of seeing the dead body as a catalyst for all of the boys to grow up and shed the traumas of childhood.
In this narrative, vision is again the sense through which messages of impending death are given and received. This is particularly evident when Chris attempts to convince Gordie that his ability to write is a gift to be cherished. Gordie states that while Chris is speaking, his face has become “crumpled and folded into something older, oldest, ageless. He spoke tonelessly, colourlessly…His eyes were hooded and dead…He smiled at me, but it was a crimped, terrible smile that never touched his eyes” (King 506-508). To Gordie, Chris has knowledge that is otherworldly. It seems as if Chris is speaking from beyond the grave, from an outside space that Gordie cannot access. Because of the ghostly quality of Chris’s face, his message to Gordie carries more weight. The importance of the message is clear because it is spoken by someone who, at least in that moment, already appears to have lived and died, one who is therefore more informed than Gordie about such matters.
When the four boys actually do find the body of Ray Brower, he has a message for them that is also expressed through the motif of seeing, or in this case, through Ray’s lack of seeing. Unbeknownst to the boys, some older kids, led by frightening hoodlum Ace Merrill and Chris’s older brother with the gruesome pseudonym “Eyeball,” have also come to lay claim to Ray’s body in the hopes of getting congratulations from the town and their names in the paper. The younger and older gangs argue amidst a violent hailstorm, but Chris has secreted his father’s gun on the trip, and the older boys depart at this threat. During the ensuing quiet, the hail begins to fill up the corpse’s eye sockets “like the eyes that look out at you from Grecian statuary” (King 555). In this moment of viewing the corpse, Gordie and his friends realize that their childhood innocence has left them. This one horrific instant brings the realization that fighting over claiming rights to a corpse has not drawn the boys any closer to understanding and conquering death. It is instead their act of leaving the body behind that enables the boys to move forward and accept what life may hold. The boys do not return to Castle Rock in triumph for having found the body of Ray Brower. They do not get their names in the newspapers, and they are not recognized for their good deed by adults who formerly ignored them. Instead, through Ray’s sad demise, the boys come to know themselves. After the boys see Ray’s eyes fill up with the hailstones, Gordie says, “It only took a second to understand what had happened, but understanding didn’t lessen the horror…Now they [the hailstones] were melting and the water ran down his cheeks as if he were weeping for his own grotesque position--a tatty prize to be fought over by two bunches of stupid hick kids” (King 555). Ray cries both for himself and for the boys who have come to claim him.
With Christ-like symbolism, Ray’s tears of melted hailstones are wept so that the boys themselves need no longer cry for their isolated and lonely lives. And like Christ’s death, Ray’s early demise has absolved the boys of their childhood traumas; from viewing Ray, they are able to move on.
Throughout his body of work, Dickens uses the dead as mysterious bearers of messages. In his plots, the dead have a higher knowledge that has been gained from their transitioning, and they can impart it to the living if they choose. The eloquent and powerful fashion by which Dickens crafts David’s lonely narrative of childhood draws heavily on the collective consciousness of humanity, impacting modern writers such as Stephen King with his inner-child character, Gordie. As we saw in David Copperfield, Ham and Steerforth, although dissimilar in their backgrounds and attitudes toward death, are able to give David a greater understanding of himself through their own deaths. Dickens imbues both characters with premonitions that their time on earth will be fleeting, and the author brings David to mental and emotional maturity through witnessing the demise of his friends. With an understanding that life is change, David at last accepts the past horrors he has endured and moves toward a positive future. Though he experiences them in twentieth-century America, Gordie is crafted as a character based upon the same themes of isolated youth. Their eventual understanding of death brings both Gordie and David to a new rebirth from their crippled child-selves. Through learning the lessons of his youth, David at last has found Agnes. She points “upwards,” reminding David of his connection to the spirit realm; she is his “soul” (Dickens 1057). As he narrates his story, the adult Gordie has married and become a successful writer. He revisits Castle Rock at the close of “The Body.” The friends of his youth have all died, the town is different, but Gordie remarks, “the river is still around. So am I” (King 582). For Gordie, the symbolic wife that points to heaven is mirrored in the river, the natural force that connects him to his God.
Images: "Stand By Me," 1986. Dir. Rob Reiner
"David Copperfield," 1999. Dir. Simon Curtis
"Steerforth and Mr Mell," Hablot K. Brown via VictorianWeb.org
Primary Sources
Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol in The Complete Ghost Stories of Charles
Dickens. Ed. Peter Haining. New York: Franklin Watts Inc., 1983. 89-151.
—. David Copperfield. Bath: The Bath Press, 1997.
King, Stephen. "The Body." Different Seasons. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2012. 383-582.
Secondary Sources
“Biography of Stephen King.” Horrorking. np. nd. Web. 27 Jan. 2013.
“David Copperfield.” Writ. Charles Dickens. Screenplay Adrian Hodges. Dir. Simon Curtis. Perf. Trevor Eve. Prod. BBC. 1999. DVD.
Hendrix, Grady. “The Great Stephen King Reread: Different Seasons.” Tor.com. Tor Books, 10 Jan. 2013. Web. 12 Jan. 2013.
Kaplan, Fred. Dickens, A Biography. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.
Magistrale, Tony. "Stephen King (1947- )." Gothic Writers: A Critical and Bibliographical Guide. Ed. Douglass H. Thomson et al. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001. 212-225.
Andrew O'Hehir. Interview with Stephen King. Salon Magazine, 24 Sept. 1998 via CNN.com Book News, http://www.cnn.com/books/news/9809/24/king.interview.salon/. 20 May 2020.
https://stephenking.com/ np. 2000-2013. Web. 12 Jan. 2013.
Thomson, Douglass H. "Charles Dickens (1812-1870)." Gothic Writers: A Critical and Bibliographical Guide. Ed. Douglass H. Thomson et al. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001. 104-116.
Tomalin, Claire. Charles Dickens, A Life. London: Penguin Group, 2012.
[1] “Using passages from the autobiographical fragment, Dickens propels David through a fictionalized version of his early school experiences…Whereas Dickens felt like an orphan, David is one” (Kaplan 252, author’s italics).
“Attachment and loss, and the shaping of adult behaviour by early experience, are [David Copperfield’s] central themes” (Tomalin 217).
[2] See Tomalin, page 29.
[3] King qtd. in “The Stephen King Interview” via CNN.com
[4] See King’s official biographical statement on www.stephenking.com.
[5] See King’s official website, www.stephenking.com.
[6] George McLeod, King’s college roommate is quoted in Lisa Rogak’s unauthorized King biography, Haunted Heart as saying, “If [King is] near something, he will absorb it like a sponge. It’s his strength and naturally it’s his weakness, too” (qtd. in Hendrix).
[7] This echoes back to David’s feeling of the attraction of repulsion when viewing Uriah Heep.