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Goblins are creatures of Ray Garraty’s embedded fairy tale, not beings encountered in the literal narrative. He places them among the dangers faced by a White Knight on a Sacred Quest, alongside trolls and wolves, and thereby gives the fantasy world a recognizable vocabulary of adventure. Yet the story’s imaginative monsters also cast an indirect light back onto the Long Walk: the tale’s violence is playful and legendary, while the Walk’s violence is immediate, bureaucratic, and physically real.

Appearance in the Embedded Tale

Garraty introduces goblins while telling Peter McVries and Stebbins about a White Knight who leaves his castle and rides through an Enchanted Forest. The knight encounters strange adventures and fights thousands of trolls and goblins, as well as a large number of wolves, before reaching the king’s castle. Goblins therefore function as one element in a conventional quest landscape: they are obstacles on the road, enemies that can be defeated, and part of the exaggerated scale of the knight’s heroic ordeal.

The tale is improvised under the pressure of the Walk. Garraty begins with the formula “Once upon a time,” then constructs the knight’s journey aloud while McVries prompts him and Stebbins corrects the details. When Stebbins objects that knights ride, Garraty revises the knight’s movement from walking to riding without abandoning the story. The goblins thus belong to a flexible oral invention rather than to a stable mythology; their importance lies less in individual characteristics than in the collective image of a fantastic world crowded with threats.

Contrast with the Long Walk

The imagined goblins create a sharp contrast with the actual soldiers and their rifles. In the real contest, a warning system turns a bodily failure into a sentence of death. When Curley is unable to maintain the required pace, the soldiers raise their carbines, the other boys scatter, and four shots destroy his head before his body falls onto the road. When Travin’s diarrhea makes him repeatedly lose pace, the soldiers watch and wait until he half-squats and half-falls, then shoot him while his pants are down. These scenes contain no enchanted transformation and no heroic distance: the threat is visible, procedural, and grotesquely physical.

The same contrast becomes even more severe in Hank Olson’s attack on the halftrack. After his abdomen has been torn open, Olson slowly rises with his hands crossed over his belly, turns toward the direction of the Walk, and staggers onward while his intestines slip through his fingers. The soldiers do not immediately shoot; one observer cries out for them to end his suffering, but Olson continues walking with a strangely calm face. Against such material horror, goblins seem almost mercifully legible. A goblin can be named as an enemy in a story; Olson’s exposed body reveals a system in which a human being is reduced to continued motion before an armed audience.

Quest Imagery and Failed Heroism

Goblins help Garraty borrow the structure of heroic adventure at the moment when the literal contest has stripped heroism from endurance. The White Knight fights through an Enchanted Forest and reaches a king’s castle in pursuit of a beloved Lady Fair. His journey has a destination, a quest-objective, and the possibility that courage will earn fulfillment. The Long Walk offers none of these protections. Its walkers move along an open road watched by soldiers, while the crowd turns suffering into a public spectacle and the prize remains inseparable from death.

The fairy-tale enemies therefore expose an inversion. In a conventional quest, monsters delay the hero’s arrival; in the Walk, the institution itself supplies the monsters, the rules, and the weapons. The boys are not rewarded for defeating an external creature. They are progressively consumed by the terms of the event, while every death confirms the authority of the system. Even the surviving walker’s path leads not toward a secure return but toward further uncertainty, exhaustion, and loss.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

The goblins are significant because they mark the boundary between imaginative consolation and witnessed reality. Garraty’s tale briefly converts the Walk into a story that can be shaped, revised, and shared. McVries laughs at the tale, and Stebbins participates by policing its internal logic, but the game cannot hold. Garraty’s dizziness interrupts the narration, and the crowd’s roar reaches him like the sound of the sea through a long tunnel. Fantasy remains available only as a fragile overlay on physical collapse.

The embedded tale also makes the Walk’s cruelty easier to see by contrast. The goblins belong to a world where danger is externalized and combat can be narrated as adventure. The Walk instead places boys under the rifles of young soldiers, including the solitary blond soldier who remains after the crowd has gone and holds a silver chronometer in one hand and a rifle in the other. That image joins measurement and violence: time determines when a body may be killed. Later, when McVries sits down and refuses to rise, soldiers wrench him away and place guns against his head; Garraty tries to substitute himself, but receives a third warning instead. The fairy-tale monster is imaginary, while the real power governing life and death is impersonal, armed, and institutionally authorized.

Goblins consequently operate as a small but revealing motif rather than as independent characters. They belong to Garraty’s story-within-the-story, yet their presence helps define the larger narrative’s moral reversal. The fantasy quest promises that the hero can pass through danger and arrive at meaning; the Long Walk repeatedly demonstrates that its obstacles are not monsters to defeat but rules, weapons, crowds, and failing bodies that reduce every participant to vulnerability.