The Long Walk

The boys are asked to define and redefine masculinity as they endure arduous mental and physical tests. As they find community and form alliances, they achieve a bond that wouldn’t be possible in any situation except the Walk.

Within the exclusively male environment of the Walk, the boys compare themselves to their competitors and negotiate their sense of individuality. All of them enter the Walk knowing that each Walker has a 1 in 100 chance of surviving; for the one who survives, all of his friends are doomed to die. Nevertheless, the boys find comfort in friendship, realizing that their Walk friends will know them in a way that their pre-Walk friends could never even conceptualize. Garraty, Baker, and McVries refer to themselves as the Musketeers, and Garraty and McVries in particular save each other countless times. The Walkers share scarce resources; Garraty gives Olson his cheese, and the boys share watermelon. Friendship becomes a means of survival, but the boys accept the terms and conditions of forming friendships in such an environment, understanding that grief inevitably accompanies friendship in the Walk. After Harkness is shot, “[t]he magic circle was broken” (129).

The boys understand gender as binary, interpreting masculine as not-feminine and interpreting feminine as not-masculine. Given that male characters are the novel’s focus and female characters rarely speak, especially with each other or about something other than men, this book absolutely fails the Bechdel Test (which tests the representation of women in fiction). Female characters act primarily as spectators or as comfort objects and are rarely depicted as having any agency. Female spectators are most often passive watchers. Percy’s mom is nearly delirious with emotion and is arrested. The boys relish the attention they receive from female spectators who believe that sex with a Walker will elevate their status. Gribble is led to his death by attractive female spectators who act as sirens; they don’t care about him but selfishly are excited by the prospect of kissing a boy who will inevitably die soon. In this world, both girls and women are viewed as always (and already) sexualized, and through the lens of Garraty’s narration and the dialogue of his male peers, girls appear as constantly desiring sex or using sex as a tool of manipulation.

Garraty considers women comfort objects; the narrative implies that the supposed heroism of his choice to join the Walk makes him believe that he deserves this status as a user of women. Although he almost immediately seizes upon his newfound fame to kiss a stranger who cheers him on, he feels guilty for betraying his girlfriend, and the thought of seeing his mother and Jan in Freeport propels him through the Walk: Jan “had turned into a life-symbol” (115).

While Garraty is confident in his heterosexuality, he feels uncomfortable with McVries’s forays into gay conversation. Garraty feels more at ease after McVries describes his heterosexual encounters with his ex-girlfriend, Priscilla, but dislikes it when McVries makes advances toward him. McVries often plays these off as jokes, and Garraty can’t tell when he’s joking. Employing a different reading of McVries might lead one to assume that his motivation to save Garraty’s life (which he does on several occasions) is rooted in romantic intent rather than friendship; another reading might suggest that McVries is unable to be himself in normal life and sees the Walk as an opportunity to escape or establish himself as a paragon of masculinity.

The Walk’s all-male environment invites boys to consider what it means to be a man; the text feels dated because depictions of gender align in a binary way and female characters only watch men, comfort them, or provide them with sex.