Gary Barkovitch

Gary Barkovitch enters the Long Walk as a strategist who believes survival depends on discipline, calculation, and a personal “Plan.” He quickly becomes the event’s principal provocateur, using hostility to isolate others and to make himself legible as a dangerous competitor. Yet his calculated persona ultimately collapses into terror and self-destruction, revealing how the Walk converts personality into spectacle before reducing every participant to a body, a warning count, and finally a death.

Identity and Introduction

Barkovitch introduces himself to Ray Garraty as Gary Barkovitch, giving Washington, D.C., as his home. His first defining gesture is not fellowship but instruction: he insists that a Walker must concentrate, pace himself, and possess a Plan. When Hank Olson dismisses such advice in favor of simply continuing to walk, Barkovitch treats the response as evidence of inferior judgment. His sharp, corrective manner establishes a social identity built around control, while his contempt makes clear that the Plan is also a claim to superiority.

That confidence is tested almost immediately. Barkovitch falls below the required speed and accumulates three warnings, then rises, brushes road dirt from his knees, trots back to the group, passes Stebbins without receiving acknowledgment, and resumes his walking pace beside Olson. He presents the recovery as proof that his penalty was deliberate, calling the lost time a rest incorporated into his Plan. Olson sees the simpler reality: Barkovitch has exchanged a brief pause for three hours of enforced walking at the faster pace. The episode exposes the gap between Barkovitch’s interpretation of events and the bodily economy imposed by the rules.

The Plan and the Performance of Power

Barkovitch’s strategy is inseparable from performance. He does not merely try to outlast the other Walkers; he tries to occupy their attention. At the washed-out plank bridge, when the repaired bridge crossing temporarily halts the Long Walk, he directs a flood of profanity at the squat boy named Rank. Rank swings at him, violating the rules and receiving a warning, but Barkovitch keeps moving, ducks beneath the punch, and continues shouting. When Rank strikes again, Barkovitch steps around the blow, though he trips over the Walker beside him and is warned along with the other boy.

The confrontation turns Barkovitch’s theory of control into a spectacle of mutual entrapment. He taunts Rank with death, urges him to pick up his feet, and tries to make the other boy’s anger itself a liability. The soldiers observe the exchange without emotion, treating the boys’ violence as a disturbance to be regulated rather than as a human crisis. Barkovitch therefore operates on two fronts: he fights the Walkers through insult and provocation, while the state’s warning system remains the larger power capable of converting every lapse into measurable danger.

His conduct also makes him a convenient object for collective moral judgment. The Walkers increasingly imagine him as a killer, and Ray Garraty eventually tells him that nobody will miss him and that the others will welcome his death. Barkovitch’s cruelty has helped create this isolation, but the response reveals a wider moral injury within the group: boys who have watched executions and accepted the rule against helping one another now transform their own fear and guilt into hatred of a designated villain.

Collapse and Self-Destruction

Near the end of Barkovitch’s course, he speaks of his desired Prize in grotesquely comic terms. He wants plastic feet, plans to have his current feet cut off, and imagines putting them in a laundromat washing machine to watch them revolve. The fantasy is both a joke and an admission that his feet have become intolerable objects, separate from the self that still insists on winning. Its frantic absurdity converts physical damage into a spectacle he can supposedly control, but the image also anticipates the destruction of the body that the Long Walk has demanded from him.

Garraty’s response is openly vicious. He says that Barkovitch has no friends and imagines spitting on his brains after the soldiers shoot him. Barkovitch then abandons his posture of invulnerability: he whines that he does not want to die and asks why the others hate him, offering to be sorry if sorrow will change their judgment. The exchange reverses their earlier positions. The persecutor becomes a pleading victim, while Garraty discovers that prolonged exposure to sanctioned death has made him capable of actively desiring and verbally rehearsing another boy’s destruction.

Barkovitch’s final breakdown is physical as well as psychological. After laughing from the darkness in a high, terrifying voice, he raises his hands and tears out his own throat. He continues screaming, clawing, and walking even after the injury, his face described as feral and turned toward the sky. The act makes literal the violence previously expressed through taunts: the character who built his identity around aggression becomes the immediate agent of his own elimination. His death is not a victorious final move in the Plan but its catastrophic negation.

Relations with the Walkers and the Machinery of Elimination

Barkovitch’s relations are structured by antagonism. He tries to recruit Olson into his system of strategic thinking, but Olson answers with sarcasm and openly rejects his authority. He provokes Rank into striking him, using Rank’s response to place him under the warning system’s scrutiny. He also becomes a continuing object of fear and contempt for the larger group, whose members measure his deterioration while keeping their distance.

The Walkers’ reactions to death place Barkovitch within a broader pattern. When Stebbins steps over Curley’s bloodied remains without changing expression, Ray Garraty understands that survival requires moving past a body as if it were part of the road. When Hank Olson later reacts to Peter McVries saving Garraty, he curses the rescue and predicts McVries’s death, revealing how the shroud of impending death has invaded the survivors’ moral perceptions. Barkovitch’s torment therefore does not stand outside the Long Walk’s violence; it concentrates it. His bullying is personal, but the conditions that reward spectacle, punish hesitation, and turn dead boys into numbers belong to the event itself.

The numerical logic becomes explicit as the Walkers continue to disappear. The group celebrates reaching ninety-nine miles even as thirty-six boys are already gone, and later Garraty imagines the record that would replace his identity if he bought his ticket: a name, a number, a mile, and a headline. Barkovitch’s reputation follows the same path from named individual to hostile label and eventual casualty. The event permits spectators and competitors to call him “The Killer,” but its institutional structure ultimately treats him no differently from anyone else: every personality is temporary, and every body is countable.

Narrative Role and Significance

Barkovitch functions as both antagonist and distorted mirror. His Plan resembles an attempt to impose private meaning on an event designed to erase meaning through repetition: walk, receive warnings, recover, and watch someone else fall. His provocations give the Long Walk a human face of cruelty, yet his collapse proves that cruelty offers no exemption from vulnerability. The identity he performs as a calculating killer depends on an audience, and when that audience becomes a hostile crowd of witnesses, the performance turns inward.

His trajectory also marks a moral transformation in Garraty. Garraty begins by recoiling from executions and wondering about the pain of Curley’s death; later he feels the seductive force of revenge and tells Barkovitch that the group will celebrate his death. Afterward, Garraty recognizes himself as an animal who has betrayed a promise to help no one. Barkovitch’s presence thus helps chart the erosion of compassion under enforced competition. He is not merely an unpleasant boy removed from the race. He is the figure through whom the Walkers’ fear, disgust, aggression, and compromised solidarity become visible.

Barkovitch’s ending leaves the event’s central contradiction exposed. The Long Walk presents endurance as individual choice and strategy, but its rules make every participant dependent on a system that defines life as continued motion and death as administrative completion. Barkovitch tries to master that system by naming his own method, provoking penalties in others, and turning his damaged body into a joke. In the end, the system and the identity he constructed within it converge: the strategist disappears, the “killer” destroys himself, and the spectacle continues walking past him.