Friendship between Gordon Lachance and Chris Chambers

The friendship between Gordon Lachance and Chris Chambers is the deepest and most consequential relationship in the story, a bond that transcends the usual hierarchies of their twelve-year-old world and becomes the primary engine of both their childhood adventure and their adult fates. It is a friendship built on mutual recognition: Chris sees Gordon's talent for storytelling as a gift from God, something that must be protected, while Gordon sees past Chris's family reputation to the intelligence and decency that the town refuses to acknowledge. Their connection is tested and proven over the course of a single weekend in September 1960, when they and two other boys set out to find the body of a missing child, and it is Chris who articulates the brutal truth that will shape Gordon's future: "Your friends drag you down, Gordie. Don't you know that?"

Identity and Background

Gordon Lachance is the younger son of aging parents who lost their beloved firstborn, Dennis, in a Jeep accident earlier that year; he has grown up feeling invisible in his own home, a feeling he later compares to the experience of the protagonist in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. Chris Chambers comes from the town's poorest and most despised family: his father is a violent drunk, his older brother Frank is in prison for rape, and another brother, Eyeball, runs with the local juvenile delinquents. The town expects Chris to turn out bad, and he has internalized that expectation, having once stolen the class milk money—only to have the teacher, Miss Simons, keep the money for herself and let him take the suspension anyway. Despite this, Chris is the toughest and most respected boy in their gang, the one who makes the best peace and the one who, in a moment of profound insight, tells Gordon that he must not let his friends drag him down.

Arc Through the Plot

The friendship is the spine of the journey to find Ray Brower's body. It is Chris who first suggests they can become heroes by reporting the body, Chris who leads them across the terrifying railroad trestle, and Chris who, when the older boys arrive to claim the body for themselves, pulls his father's .45 pistol and faces down Ace Merrill. In the aftermath, when the others have fled from the hailstorm, Chris stands his ground with Gordon, and it is Chris who breaks down afterward, crying and screaming in the mud, overwhelmed by the horror of what they have seen and the impossibility of claiming the dead boy as their own. The friendship is also the vehicle for the story's most explicit statement of its theme: Chris tells Gordon that he must take the college-prep courses and not follow his friends into the shop classes, because if he does, he will end up working in the mill, and "that pie story will never get written down. Nothin'll get written down."

Relationships and Conflict

The friendship is defined by a series of confrontations with the forces that would tear them apart. Chris's brother Eyeball is among the older boys who try to steal the body, and Chris must threaten to shoot his own brother to protect what he and Gordon have found. After the trip, Ace Merrill and his gang beat Gordon severely, breaking his nose and two fingers, while Eyeball breaks Chris's arm in two places. The violence is a direct consequence of their refusal to back down, and it cements their bond even as it drives them apart from their other friends, Vern and Teddy, who drift away after the beating. Chris and Gordon study together almost every night for years, Chris laboring to overcome the educational deficits of a childhood spent in the shop courses, and Gordon helping him because "if he had drowned, that part of me would have drowned with him."

Change and Ending

The friendship ends with Chris's death in 1971, when he is stabbed in the throat while trying to make peace between two arguing men in a Portland Chicken Delight. Gordon reads about it in the newspaper, drives out of town, and cries for half an hour. He cannot cry in front of his wife; "It would have been pussy." The loss is permanent and defining: Gordon becomes a successful writer, but he carries the wound of Chris's death, and the memory of their friendship is the standard against which all later relationships are measured. In the final pages, Gordon reflects that he never had any friends later on like the ones he had when he was twelve, and he acknowledges that of the four boys who set out on that journey, only he is still alive.

Thematic Significance

The friendship between Gordon and Chris embodies the story's central tension between aspiration and the gravitational pull of one's origins. Chris's belief in Gordon's talent is what saves Gordon from the fate that awaits Vern and Teddy, and Gordon's belief in Chris's intelligence is what gives Chris the courage to try to escape Castle Rock. Their bond is a counterweight to the deterministic forces of class and family reputation, and its destruction—Chris's death, Gordon's survival—is the story's final, bitter proof that "some people drown." The friendship is also the source of the story's most famous line, spoken by Chris: "I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, did you?"