Code Name Verity Themes

As themes go, friendship is the big one, the white whale, the lucky penny, the x-marks-the-spot on the treasure map. In other words, Shmoopsters, Code Name Verity is all about friendship: what it i...

Really, was there a chance manipulation wouldn't be one of the themes in a spy novel? Espionage and interrogation are all about manipulating people, about carefully lying and carefully telling the...

Warfare is another great big glaring theme in Code Name Verity. Without warfare, we wouldn't have much of a book, after all—there'd be no interrogation, no flying to France, and no friendship bet...

We'd be surprised if fear weren't a theme in a book about fighting the Nazis. Maddie and Julie talk about their fears a lot, to the point where they each maintain a list of ten things they're afrai...

Perseverance: hanging in, hanging on, getting the job done. It's a useful quality to have in war, and in life. In Code Name Verity, Julie has a mission to complete, Maddie has a friend to save, and...

What's a war without a few traitors in the mix? Julie calls herself a traitor on every other page of her "confession," mostly to convince the Ormaie Gestapo that she's actually giving them valuable...

Most books about any war will deal with the idea of mortality, if only because lots of people tend to die in war, which puts it on everyone's mind. In Code Name Verity, there's a lot of waiting for...

The theme of society and class comes in to play in Code Name Verity mostly through the contrast between Maddie's and Julie's backgrounds. Maddie is middle-class and Julie is a titled aristocrat, bu...

It's impossible to title a novel Code Name Verity and not deal with the concept of truth. Okay, we guess it's possible, but it's not very likely since verity, or la vérité in French, means truth....