View Profile
View Forum Posts
View Forum Threads
Show All Albums
Private Message
View Friends
Re: The Long Walk !?!?!?! what a end?
Yo, check it, the dark figure Garraty is chasing isn't anyone else, and it's not the Grim Reaper. The dark figure is Garraty himself. The Long Walk, just like the other 3 Bachman books, is about rebellion. Whereas Rage and The Running Man are about rebellion against society, Roadwork and Walk are about rebellion against the self and the rut a life can work its way into.
We start the book with the character of Garraty being a bit of a mixed up dude. We get little snippets here and there, sketching it out that:
- He feels he isn't properly grown up.
- He's sexually mixed up, has homosexual tendencies, is scared of sex and wants to bang his mother.
- He's ambiguous towards his girlfriend - loves her and wants to bone her, but also is contemptuous of her at points.
- His home life is pretty crappy; dad gone, some Dr. trying to doink his mother, too much of a milksop to get with Jan.
- As a character he's REALLY indecisive and vague - right from the first page he's made to feel insecure by Olsen, McVries and Stebbins, and he's an apologetic, murmuring, shambling typical teen.
And so he joins the Long Walk. Everyone else has their reasons to want to smash themselves to smithereens - Abraham can't accept life being lived as anything other than a cynical joke, Barkovitch wants to see folk (and himself) die for rejecting him, Baker is disgusted by the family and culture that raised him, Stebbins is trying to see his dad for validation, or die trying and so on and so forth, and then you got Garraty who just kinda...floated in. But, in the process of floating in, he managed to hurt the mother who mollycoddles him, the girlfriend he feels leaves him dangling and the doctor who is trying to replace his dad. By joining the Long Walk, and not, say, smoking crack and stabbing people, he's getting back at the absentee dad who got Squaded. This is a cat wants to get down with his bad self and stop being such a wuss. And so, throughout the book, he becomes less and less of an amiable pushover, being forged by the threat of death and the horror around him, until he becomes the Garraty he wants to be - that is his prize, that is his every wish granted. He goes from being someone who immediately repents of being a bit mean to the psychotic Barkovitch, to someone who'll coldly tell Stebbins he's going to walk him to death. He goes from being effortlessly wound up by McVries, to being someone so stoic and uncaring that McVries gets pissed off at him. He goes from someone who feels compelled to waste energy waving at every yahoo, to someone who shouts insults at strangers. He goes from being someone so jacked up about interpersonal relationships that he busts his best friend in the face for telling him about vaginas and turns down the sex he's always wanted, to being able to weep and show open emotion over the death of his friends and hump crowd members. In short, he goes from being a bundle of repression and teen angst and matures into the man he wants to be - I paraphrase when I say he "lived his entire life on this road". And so, at the end, his journey complete, he finds the strength to go towards the dark half of himself, and become Ray Garraty for real. CHECK IT.
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by jenboxer77
Bookmarks