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.