“He’s got nothing on!”

“He’s got nothing on!” is Ben’s puzzled, childlike exclamation in St. Joseph’s Church, where it breaks into a tense moment around the Madonna statue. Its immediate force is comic, but the scene leaves the precise object of Ben’s remark unstated, allowing the line to register as an abrupt response to what he sees rather than explaining it outright.

Occurrence and Context

As Gerry Fenn and a priest walk toward the vestry, their footsteps sound unnaturally loud in the empty church. Fenn glances at the Statue of the Virgin Mary in St. Joseph’s Church and notices that no whiteness remains. A child’s voice then rings out with the line. The transition from Fenn’s silent observation to Ben’s direct announcement makes the remark a sudden interruption of the church’s solemn atmosphere.

Ben is sitting beside Sue, who has her eyes closed and is oblivious to the noise around her. He has recovered from an earlier fright at the sight of a man with a funny face; the narration notes that he has already seen people with severe physical conditions. His exclamation therefore arrives in a scene where a child’s plain response contrasts with the adults’ silence and distraction.

Allusion and Effect

The narration immediately associates Ben’s words with Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” That allusion frames the exclamation as a child’s blunt naming of an apparent lack, while the church setting gives the line a sharper edge: what the adults do not explain, Ben says aloud. The text does not explicitly identify what he is looking at, so the force of the expression lies partly in its timing—following Fenn’s glance at the changed statue—and in the gap between the child’s certainty and the adults’ unspoken reaction.