Written under the supervision of doc. Clare Wallace, PhD, M.A., and submitted on 18 June 2013, this essay was part of my total coursework at the Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at Charles University’s Faculty of Arts. The essay is published with the kind permission of the faculty.

Child Narrators

Merely taking a brief look into any list of recently published child-narrated books no one can doubt the immense popularity of this genre right now. With novels such as Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close being adapted into full-length feature films the technique of child narration, generally known thanks to such literary classics as Huckleberry Finn or To Kill a Mockingbird, is receiving ever more attention and inspiring other writers to make use of it in their own works. There is a plethora of potential reasons for the widespread appeal of this technique, all of which will be discussed later on.

Perhaps the most fundamental one, though, has to do with the relationship between the reader and the narrating character of the child. In her Daily Herald Tribune article the correspondent Alexis Kienlen writes that, „children and teenagers have intense emotions, and are establishing their identities, which gives them a unique perspective on life and a certain tone to their narration“ (Kienlen). We may argue that one of the characteristic features of this tone of narration is its universality. In simple terms, it is easy for us to sympathize with the child narrator, to get into their skin, because at one point or another we were all children, and to a certain extent we still remember what it was like for us at the time.

This is a very adult-centric approach, of course, so it should be also mentioned that child narrators provide perfect opportunities for identification to children as well. Rose M. Somerville, for instance, points out in her essay entitled „The Short Story and Family Insights in Secondary Schools“ that it is not unusual for stories narrated by children to have direct relation to the life experiences of their child readers (Somerville, 225). With the readers‘ capacity for empathy thus increased the stories have the ability to resonate with them, or perhaps have some edifying or cathartic effect on them.

In spite of the popularity of the genre, though, the technique of child narration has so far been criminally underresearched. One of the possible reasons for this may be the fact that, „even the best adult books with child narrators risk being treated as if they are children’s books“ (Love) and as such academically devalued and considered unworthy of much critical attention. Another reason might have to do with the uncontrollable eruptions of sheer animosity towards the technique that some critics show in their writings. For example, two of the most frequently discussed child-narrated novels of the noughties, Marisha Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics and the already mentioned Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, were met with accusations of being „cloying, gimmicky, mannered, precious, faux-innocent, forced, unbelievable, exasperating, show-offy, or just plain annoying“ (Shulock).

Whatever the reasons for the unchartedness of this territory, it is my intention in this essay to discuss the features and effects of this technique, to lay down the theory of child narration, and consequently to apply my findings to my reading of William Golding’s short story „Billy the Kid“ and Frank O’Connor’s „My Oedipus Complex“. When discussing the features of the child narration in the first part of this paper I will be drawing examples from or simply alluding to a variety of sources including the two aforementioned books by Foer and Pessl, as well as George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, and James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

The Irony of Children’s Insight

Child-narrated stories are usually written from the first person perspective and may be divided into two different types: In the first the narrator is the age of the child and allows the reader to discover and learn new things along with them; in the second the narrator is distinguishably older and is only remembering a story from their childhood – they may make comments on the actions of their younger selves but other than that the illusion of child innocence and naïveté is preserved  (Kienlen). While it is true that the majority of child-narrated stories (of both types) are written from the first person perspective, the third person point of view is also possible. In that case, though, the gap between the main character of the child and the narrator attempting to sound like that child would inevitably grow even wider, and even though the story may still provide interesting insights into the child’s mind it would prove a bit more difficult for readers to identify with them.

The issue of children’s lack of perceptive or cognitive skills, which was mentioned before, is actually an incredibly important one. As Tim Love writes in his 2011 article on child narrators, „the child might not understand what’s going on, but readers are likely to. The difference between the character’s and the reader’s understanding can be exploited for laughs or for more serious effect“ (Love). The humorous use of this incongruousness can be found, interestingly enough, in one of the most dramatic scenes in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. In the passage where Scout and Jem essentially manage to stop a soon-to-become lynch mob from committing their crime, Scout describes her encounter with a particularly obnoxious burly man: „I kicked the man swiftly. Barefooted, I was surprised to see him fall back in real pain. I intended to kick his shin but aimed too high“ (Lee, 204). Without the child even realizing it, the humorous testicular implication is clear to most adult readers.

For the exemplification of the more serious utilization of this antinomy we may go to the first book of George R. R. Martin’s wildly popular A Song of Ice and Fire series entitled A Game of Thrones. In the series, most chapters are narrated from the point of view of one character, one of these being a seven year old boy named Bran. In the beginning of the first novel Bran climbs into one of the top windows of an abandoned tower only to see something he was not supposed to see: „Inside the room, a man and a woman were wrestling. They were both naked“ (Martin, 80). The little boy is not mature enough to know that the two characters are having sex. What might be an entertaining anecdote, however, receives much darker undertones when the boy realizes that the female wrestler is the queen of the realm and her male opponent her brother – a realization which nearly costs him his life as he is immediately thrown out of the window by the brother, effectually setting the plot of the blood-soaked series into motion.

The main point here is that the discrepancy between, on the one hand, what the child sees and thinks is happening and, on the other hand, what the adult reader knows the child is missing in his interpretation of the situation generates a great deal of dramatic irony. Saying that we may remember the opening paragraphs of this paper arguing that one of the main reasons the genre of child-narrated literature is so popular these days is its capacity to arouse feelings of empathy in its readers. How is it possible, then, that a genre which relies so heavily on dramatic irony – a tool whose very purpose is to create a distance between the characters and the readers – is able to make its readers feel such empathy? I would argue that the dramatic irony used here and the potential for reader identification are not mutually exclusive concepts, and that they actually go hand in hand. If anything, these situations make us sympathize with the child characters, remembering our own childhood blunders and follies.

It must be added that having a child narrate the story is not only a source of many a misunderstanding of the outer reality on the child’s part. Love writes the following:

Though children might not understand what’s going on, and might be unable to be involved in the scene, they have certain advantages as observers – like cameras, they might see things from a new angle and might be ignored by the protagonists. (Love)

Elizabeth Baines adds to this point that, „children can have instinctual knowledge which we adults can lose, and these insights yet gaps can be the stuff of dramatic conflict and motor a story“ (Love). In To Kill a Mockingbird, for instance, Scout can be described as a fairly neutral character that, in spite of her perceptive or cognitive limitations, is unmarked by the prejudice that the majority of the adult characters in the book seem to have succumbed to (KJ theBookGirl). Of course, we have to realize that all these insights into the juvenile psyche, all this innocence and purity of thought, are nothing but a projection of the (most of the time) adult author. Unless the author is actually a child or the book is based, for instance, on their genuine entries into a diary, the technique is in this sense to a great extent arbitrary – a point which will be discussed later.

 

The Unreliable Heaviness of Themes

Child narrators are generally considered to be unreliable precisely for the reason that the children involved do not fully comprehend the situations of the plot in the development of which they take part. In the case of the more recently published works, though, there appears to be another reason as well, one that has to do with the overarching themes of the books. The fact that Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close deals with a child coming to terms with the death of his father, that Special Topics in Calamity Physics tells the story of a teenager whose mother has died in a car accident, or that To Kill a Mockingbird features not only an attempted lynching but also a case of arson and an attempted double murder all allude to the overall thematic weightiness elaborated in these stories. As Anne Shulock writes, these books put children, „in the position to feel like they can, and should, come up with answers to some of life’s biggest questions“ (Shulock). In such stressful situations it is easily understandable that the narrator’s powers of perception would be compromised, be they adult or not.

Nevertheless, it has also been noted that the child bias is not always omnipresent in the child-narrated pieces of literature, and that writers frequently feel the need to – as if – slip out of the character of the child and convey some unbiased information. A commonly used way to include an adult’s viewpoint is for the child to be an uncomprehending messenger, for instance to have the child find an adult’s diary and read it, or to have them eavesdrop on an adult conversation or a phone call (Love). In James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, for instance, the main character is a witness as a young boy to a heated political and religious discussion over the Christmas dinner table. Stephen at that point functions merely as a voice recorder, telling us precisely what everybody said and did, but leaving out his potentially erroneous interpretations of the family members‘ pronouncements. This is, of course, a rather clever way to get the „unpolluted“ message across but there are other ways as well.

In To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee not only uses these direct quotations but she also – quite freely, we may add – blends the voices of the child and the adult Scout. The novel even opens with the adult narrator reflecting back to the year she was six years old: „When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow. […] When enough years had gone by to enable us to look back on them, we sometimes discussed the events leading to his accident“ (Lee, 1). Susan Henderson goes even as far as to argue that Harper Lee in her only published novel never truly writes from the point of view of a child since, „all the while, as you’re walking into the dark with your young narrator, you’re aware of the large picture“ (Henderson). In her line of argumentation, it is precisely the adult narrator’s alter ego that provides the reader with this larger picture. Judging by these words and the fact that the book is universally considered to indeed have a child narrator, it is likely that Henderson, when writing her piece, did not think of the concept of dramatic irony. Nonetheless she raises an important issue: The two voices, on numerous occasions, do seem to switch or merge in this book, effectually providing validation to the child narrator and the story she tells.

Finally, in the recent years it appears that a third way of validating the perceptibly unreliable child narrators‘ voices is on the rise: The narrators are made into precocious or special needs children. To give some examples, the narrator in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a self-proclaimed „inventor, jewelry designer, jewelry fabricator, amateur entomologist, Francophile, vegan, origamist, pacifist, percussionist, amateur astronomer, computer consultant, amateur archaeologist, collector“ (Shulock), whose thoughts have a tendency to trail off; the narrator in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time suffers from the Asperger’s syndrome; and in addition to all these, in her article on precocious narrators Anne Shulock gives a list of other contemporary books whose child narrators may be characterized as being anything from autistic to polymaths (Shulock).

 

Autobiographical Elements

Due to the fact that child-narrated stories generally boast large quantities of details and observations of a highly personal nature readers might ask to what extent is this kind of literature autobiographical. Broadly speaking, it seems that the extremely individual and personal subject of childhood trepans authors of child-narrated tales into relying more heavily on the use of autobiographical elements that it is the case in other literary genres. We know, for example, that Harper Lee based her novel, to an extent, on her own childhood experience, famously modeling the character of Dill on her lifelong friend Truman Capote; or that Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man equally contains a large amount of autobiographical parallels, the aforementioned dinner quarrel being a near verbatim transcription of an argument to which young Joyce was himself a witness.

In this respect, memory logically plays an important role in the act of writing a child-narrated story. Elizabeth Baines comments on this issue in the following way:

The key, I think is memory: quite simply, remembering, never forgetting what it was like to be a child. When I was in my early twenties I made a conscious vow never to forget what it was like to be a child. (Love)

There is a host of problems with this statement, of course, the most serious of them having to do with the subjectivity of one’s perception and the unreliability of one’s senses and memories. Nevertheless, this does not truly need to be an issue as an author does not have to rely solely on the memories of their own childhood. Parenthood appears to be an equally valuable source of inspiration for this type of writing.  The main problem here, though, is the fact that, „parents have less time to write“ (Love). According to Charles Lambert, this temporal challenge can be completely avoided by not having any children at all:

Having no children myself means that I’ve never fully grown up. I’m at the age where many of my friends are wondering why hostile, sulky delinquents from outer space have occupied their teenage children’s bodies. And what do I do? Easy, I side with the kids. Basically, I can’t grasp the crisis from the parent’s viewpoint, however hard I try.

The usefulness of all these discussions about the extent of autobiographical input is debatable, of course, as it may be perceived as irrelevant whether the events described by the child narrator actually happened or not. It is indisputable, though, that the knowledge in the back of readers‘ minds that the story they are reading has a real-life basis may increase the enjoyability of their reading experience.

 

Linguistic and Formal Inventiveness

As Alexis Kienlen writes, „effective child narrators are difficult to create [as] the voice has to be creative yet believable and consistent“ (Kienlen). One of the main issues to be considered here is the lexical side of child-narrated writings. Children’s language is rather specific, their vocabulary limited, so one would logically assume that a story which is supposed to be narrated by a child would have to take this fact into account. Many readers, for instance, might be unwilling to accept that the child narrator in the first chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man would give the following scenic description: „The wide playgrounds were swarming with boys“ (Joyce, 4). They might be of the opinion that, surely, no child would express themselves in this fashion.

Writers are clearly aware of this issue, as evidenced by the many ways they attempt to either resolve it or circumvent it. George R. R. Martin, for instance, writes most of the chapters in A Song of Ice and Fire series in third person voice, which gives him a certain leeway with the level of language he uses in those narrated from the point of view of the seven year old Bran; Harper Lee – as it was already mentioned – opted in her novel for an amalgamation of the two narrative voices, the child’s and the adult’s; and having a precocious child narrator is yet another possibility of dealing with this lexical conundrum.

While it may seem from the above lines that children’s language is in its very essence simple and unsophisticated, the truth is actually quite the opposite. As Tim Love writes, „children may not have a wide, intellectual vocabulary, but that needn’t be such a restriction. They can be original in their use of words, less restricted by convention and social mores“ (Love). Authors of child-narrated stories frequently sprinkle their texts with these lexical gems in order to invoke or strengthen the feeling that the story is indeed narrated by a child, or simply because of the sheer joy that stems from the use of such delightful words. We may find a good example of some of this extraordinary vocabulary and neologisms in Joyce’s previously dispraised novel whose opening sentence reads:

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo… (Joyce, 3)

Anne Shulock adds to this point that particularly in books published in recent years this sort of lexical playfulness extends to formal features as well, claiming that, „formal inventiveness is a salient trait in these novels“ (Shulock). Perhaps this trend reflects the childish nature of their narrators, perhaps in some cases it is indicative of their personality traits and/or mental status, or perhaps all of this has to do with the post-modern interest in formal experimentation. Whatever the reason or cause may be, Shulock lists several examples of formal features one might expect in a contemporary child-narrated piece of writing:

The books include maps and diagrams in the margins; pages in color and marked up with a red correction pen; illustrations and photos; blank pages; pages with type so dense they’re unreadable; foot notes and citations; chapters named for classic books or numbered with increasing prime numbers; and codas of a mathematical proof (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time), a Final Exam (Special Topics in Calamity Physics), and a flip book (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close). (Shulock)

 

A Game at Realism

Returning to the idea of linguistic genuineness in child-narrated writings, many readers seem to take issue with the very technique, arguing that the language the narrators use and the way they tell their stories are not realistic. Writing about To Kill a Mockingbird, an aggravated blogger remarked:

One of my biggest problems with TKM is Scout. I just don’t believe her. Kids don’t think and talk and see the world the was Scout does. […] Life’s messy and complicated. While it is happening, it’s impossible to know which events are meaningful. […] Looking back to 5 or 9 or 11, it’s a blur. It’s hard for me to believe any child could look back and weave together a coherent story out of memories. Ultimately, I just don’t buy it. (Jenny)

The goaded critic clearly overlooked the fact that Harper Lee mixes the adult narrative voice with the one of the child, as well as the fact that any novel will necessarily have some expectations regarding the way the story is weaved together. Michael Seraphinoff adds to this point: „The discerning readers will understand that [a child narrator] is a figure of literary invention, that his narration is the literary product of the adult researcher, organizer, and arranger of his story“ (Seraphinoff). In other words, for Seraphinoff the voice of a child-narrator is but a game the rules of which readers have to accept upon their first decision to open up and read the book.

Nevertheless, the annoyed reviewer also unknowingly put her finger on another important issue: Is reaching absolute realism in child-narratives – regarding the language, the form, the very style of narration – the only aim of that technique, its true goal? Anne Shulock argues that it is not. She writes that while reviewers often remark that the protagonists sound nothing like a „real“ child, „reality and fidelity are not of primary concern“ (Shulock). Perhaps the main objective here is not achieving perfect verisimilitude but rather creating a narrative voice – and creating it in a way that it sounds as realistic as possible, but not to the point of obsessing about every single detail – that would allow writers to surreptitiously discuss topics that one might not want to – or be able to – discuss openly. Which brings us to the last point.

 

Inconvenient Truths Uncensored

Child narrators are frequently used to tell stories dealing with „heavy“ subjects, controversial topics or generally themes which, if they were to be addressed directly, might for whatever reason become causes of some concern. Michael Seraphinoff, for instance, points out that there is a vast number of Macedonian writers who have made use of child narrators in their books to address the issue of their state’s oppression. To quote his very well-put argument:

A child narrator can, among other things, create a degree of distance between the adult author and his or her message that serves to lessen hostility to that message. Readers tend to be more accepting of a child rather than an adult who gives voice to certain uncomfortable or controversial truths, because, after all, as American talk show host Art Linkletter, who made a career out of publicizing their utterances would say: “Kids say the darndest things”. (Seraphinoff)

The alleviating effect of having a child narrator is not restricted to Macedonian literature, of course. In fact, it has been used on numerous occasions in the Anglophone literary canon as well. Mark Twain famously took full advantage of this technique when he tackled the issue of slavery in his Huckleberry Finn. As Seraphinoff puts it: „He did this mere decades after the bloody Civil War, at a time when many southern white people, although defeated in war, were in deep denial concerning the cruel injustice their former ownership of Black Americans had constituted“ (Seraphinoff). Given this pattern it is not that surprising that the main character and narrator in To Kill a Mockingbird, a novel dealing with racism and rights of African-Americans, is a child as well. In both of these books, the fact that the narrators are children and therefore do no comprehend everything to the fullest extent, allowed their authors to address important issues in a way that was often not direct and thus make their messages „easier to swallow“. Similarly, having Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close – a novel about a child coping with the death of his father, who was killed in the WTC attacks – narrated by said child made it easier for the author to write about the 9/11 trauma since he was at least not obliged to use adult reason to make sense of that day and its aftermath.

Because of the indirectness with which child-narrated stories approach their subject matters this genre of literature is also very resistant to censorship. As Rose M. Somerville writes: „There are stories which have fever problems with censorship […], and these usually have a young child as a major character“ (Somerville, 228). To give an example, the fact that the incest scene in A Game of Thrones is narrated by a child may be indicative not only of Martin’s realization that this technique makes it possible for him to depict exactly what he needs to without the necessity of going into any details, but also of his cunning with regards to censorship. While an explicitly detailed scene of incest might have caused him troubles in 1996 with censors or even his own publisher, describing the scene indirectly using a child narrator shielded him not only from the censor’s editing pen but also from potential accusations of obscenity and immorality sent to him by his offended and aggravated readers.

„Billy the Kid“ and „My Oedipus Complex“

Now that we have laid down the theoretical groundwork, let us apply it to the two short stories mentioned in the thesis of this paper – William Golding’s „Billy the Kid“ and Frank O’Connor’s „My Oedipus Complex“ – starting with the issues of the narrative voice, narrators‘ insight and the overall dramatic irony.

Golding makes it apparent that while the narrator is supposed to sound like a child, the „true“ narrative voice is distinguishably older than that. This is evidenced, for instance, by sentences like, „No one had suggested, before this time, that anything mattered outside myself“ (Golding, 112), or, „I had read much for my age, but saw no point in figures“ (112), which temporally distance the adult narrator from his younger experiencing self. In the case of O’Connor’s story, the illusion of the child narrator is kept much more painstakingly even though it must be added that the occasional retrospective sentence such as, „The war was the most peaceful period of my life“ (O’Connor, 396) does break that illusion a bit.

Both texts heavily use all sorts of humorous insights into the minds of their child narrators and observations of their understanding of everyday reality. Thus, in Golding’s text, we are treated to such delightful passages as, „The girls played with dolls or at weddings. […] We boys ignored them with a contempt of inexpressible depth“ (113) or, „A rolled-up exercise book became an epic sword“ (114). In his own story, O’Connor’s narrator not only points out a fairly universal children’s irk when he goes for a walk with his father and says, „When I wanted to stop he simply went on, dragging me behind him by the hand; when he wanted to stop I had no alternative but to do the same“ (398), which makes the readers extremely sympathetic with his plight, but he also provides an excellent insight into his child conception of time: „When I woke […] I got up and sat on the floor and played – for hours, it seemed to me. Then I got my chair and looked out the attic window for more hours“ (401). Suffice to say that – judging by the proceedings of the plot – all these hours most probably amounted to a mere couple of minutes.

As for the presence of dramatic irony, it will not be surprising that it can be found in both texts as well. Here, however, it must be stressed that it serves a different purpose in each story. In O’Connor it is clearly used for comical purposes, the humor stemming from the fact that the child obviously does not comprehend what is happening around him but is in spite of that very sure he knows and understands everything. In other words, the contrast between his reasoning and conception of the world, and the reality that we as readers are able to see between the lines is the source of much comedy this short story provides. For example, the naïveté of the child narrator may be ridiculed or even larkishly mocked by readers when he states:

Mother said we couldn’t afford [a new baby] till father came back from the war because they cost seventeen and six. That showed how simple she was. The Geneys up the road had a baby, and everyone knew they couldn’t afford seventeen and six. (396)

In case of Golding, though, while the dramatic irony is also used at times for humorous purposes (let us, for instance, recall the following passage: „I exulted in victory, in the complete subjugation of my adversary, and thought that they should enjoy it too – or at least be glad to suffer for my sake“ (101).) the main ironic impulse of the story comes at its very end when we suddenly realize that what the mother of the narrator has told his teacher (and thus the only reason his classmates have suddenly started to behave so well towards him) has to do with his father’s death in the trenches of WW1. While the readers realize that the children must have been told to be good to their recently orphaned friend, the child narrator remains blissfully unaware of anything that does not concern his own popularity among his classmates.

As for the second point of the theoretical part of this paper, the seriousness of themes employed in child-narrated stories, we will have to focus mainly on Golding’s story. It is true that O’Connor’s is a tale that unquestionably has great dramatic potential – we have got the return of the father, who is potentially suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and with whom the child narrator is forced to suddenly cohabitate, the gradual distancing of his mother, or the arrival of his baby brother – but while some of these events seem to bear great significance for the child, we as readers will inevitably find them, more than anything else, serene and their hyperbolic drama perhaps even comical.

In case of Golding’s story, however, the implication that the father has died in the war gives the tale a much darker undertone. Yet, nothing is mentioned directly as the child is unable to comprehend the sad reality. Having a child narrator in this tale works perfectly, then, if Golding’s initial plan was to write a story about loss in the family, loss caused by the brutality of war, without being too obvious or getting too close to the subject matter.

The autobiographical elements, that is our third point, come very much into question in Golding’s case for it is known about his shorter pieces and sketches that they contain a substantial amount of autobiographical material (111). It is true that the part of the plot involving the deceased father must be fabulated, as Golding’s father worked as a school teacher from 1905 to his retirement and never went to the front (Harry), but the main story may be based on a memory Golding had from his childhood. Additionally, the following passage seems so specific and detailed that we may be very easily convinced of its genuineness:

When we were back at our desks, I found my rubber was gone, and no one would lend me another. But I needed a rubber, so I chewed up a piece of paper and used that. Miss detected my fault and cried out in mixed horror and amusement. (114)

In case of O’Connor it would be very difficult to decide what is based in reality and what is a product of his imagination. One thing is for certain – the whole part of the plot involving the birth of the narrator’s brother does not have its roots in O’Connor’s life as he was an only child. Perhaps some parts of the shorts story indeed are at least partially autobiographical – for instance the feet game appears to be, once again, suspiciously specific in this respect; and our knowledge of the fact that O’Connor’s own father suffered from alcoholism, and because of that his family must have suffered in some way along with him, may provide an unpleasant undertone to the father’s bouts of anger in the story – but attempting to identify them with certainty and elaborate on them in any way would be closer to a fruitless guesswork than anything else.

Regarding the fourth point, inventiveness in both language and form, it is apparent that both texts are not of recent publication in the sense that they are in no way formally experimental. As far as the lexical side of the stories is concerned, then, it must be said that both of them boast a radically different approach to language. The faux-child narrator in „Billy the Kid“, who is actually an adult in disguise, tells his story in a highly sophisticated language – a sentence such as, „Lily hung my coat up, took me upstairs and deposited me among a score or so of children who ranged in age from five to eleven“ (111), while very eloquent in itself, is most probably one that would never be uttered by a child. At the same time, though, the text is – in keeping with our theory – interspersed with amazingly inventive juvenile neologisms such as deebriss, sweeside, dongbulla, scaffole or creckant as well as instances of childish gibberish like, „Nonsense! Sky, fly, pie, soup, hoop, croup – geourgeous“ (113).

O’Connor is much tamer in, on the one hand, this respect, „My Oedipus Complex“ not containing any neologisms of this sort. On the other hand, his writing style is much more approachable and straightforward – he does not indulge in the same kind of lexical or syntactic acrobatics that Golding seems to do – and in this sense he does seem to be a bit closer to an actual child’s speech.

As for the fifth point, the issue of realism of child narration, it might be disputable which of the two stories offers better depiction of child psyche, better window into juvenile mind, as the two authors opted for rather dissimilar approaches to the technique. I would argue, though, that O’Connor’s story, while lacking Golding’s linguistic inventiveness, surpasses „Billy the Kid“ in the sense that its simpler prose style, its absence of the narrative voice of the adult alter-ego, and its consistent reliance on the description of the child’s thoughts as well as on his non-objective accounts of events provide a much more convincing depiction of a child’s voice.

Given the overwhelmingly comical use of child narration in „My Oedipus Complex“ the last point, which has to do with the technique being used to tackle „heavy“ subjects, really pertains solely to Golding’s story. As it was already mentioned, Golding in this tale hints at the impact of wartime bloodshed on families. Even though this is a conjecture, he might have opted for this form of narration in order to avoid excessive explicitness and thus also censorship, or because he thought the story would be more entertaining or simply work better if he only hinted at the issue.

Whether anybody finds the story entertaining and the voice convincing is a topic for another debate. It must be said, though, that the whole technique is supposed to imitate a child’s voice to the extent of sounding similar to it but not entirely same. Parents and teachers have plenty of material written by children but the objective truth is that – even though their works certainly do have their charm – unless the child is a literary genius most of these works are not worth publishing. If the stories narrated by children were to be truly narrated in that way nobody would want to read them, so perhaps the objective of this technique lies somewhere else. Perhaps it is precisely in providing writers with the ability to tackle compelling and weighty topics in a way that is captivating yet unostentatious. Perhaps the main objective of child narration is not only to entertain but also to allow writers to go back to the safety of the past and thus help them overcome the present crises.

Bibliography

Primary Literature:

Golding, William. „Billy the Kid.“ Seminar Copy.

Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2010.

Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. London: Penguin Books, 2000.

Martin, George R. R. A Game of Thrones. London: Harper Voyager, 2011.

O’Connor, Frank. „My Oedipus Complex.“ Seminar Copy.

 

Secondary Sources:

Harry, Tim. „Biography: William Golding.“ Helium 17 June 2013. 17 June 2013 <http://www.helium.com/items/941050-william-golding-author-of-lord-of-the-flies>

Henderson, Susan. „Child Narrators in Grown-up Books.“ Powell’s Books 17 June 2013. 17 June 2013 <http://www.powells.com/blog/contributors/child-narrators-in-grown-up-books-by-susan-henderson/>

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