2006:132
D - U P P S A T S
The Catcher in the Rye &
The Children´s Island
Two portraits of a growing boy´s confrontations with reality
Lena Wiklund
Luleå tekniska universitet D-uppsats
Engelska
Institutionen för Språk och kultur
2006:132 - ISSN: 1402-1552 - ISRN: LTU-DUPP--06/132--SE
Abstract
The aim of this essay is to compare and analyze the two main characters in The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger and The Children’s Island by PC Jersild, to see what sets them apart and what similarities they have. The reason for focusing on these two characters specifically is to see if a change in the nuclear family has any effect on the boys’ maturity. To see if their family relations and their environment have any effect on the boys’ lives.
Growing up is never easy, you are always searching for yourself and your own identity, trying to make a difference in the world but foremost in your own life. Holden Caulfield and Reine Larsson are two very separate individuals. There are a lot of things that separate these two boys, among other things, their social situation and the way each boy handles his search for answers and problems, but they have one thing that binds them together, their hatred of adults.
However, despite their differences, Reine and Holden also have a few fundamental things in common. Both of them are afraid that their childhood is coming to an end and that adult life is waiting around the corner. They also have the same notion that the impending adult life will bring nothing but a lot of trouble. Perhaps it depends on the fact that both boys feel betrayed by their parents. They are searchers, searching for an identity of their own and their own place in society.
Holden wants to know who he really is and Reine wants to know if he really exists.
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
INTRODUCTION 3
THE CATCHER IN THE RYE 5
Holden Caulfield 7
Family relations 8
Attitudes 9
Influences from his environment 9
THE CHILDREN’S ISLAND 12
Reine Larsson 13
Family relations 15
Attitudes 16
Influences from his environment 17
CONCLUSION 20
WORKS CITED 22
Introduction
Growing up is never easy. Just when you learn what it is to be a child you are flung into a whole different world, an adult world, always searching for yourself and your own identity. This quest can sometimes create a frustration and panic-like feeling that you do not belong anywhere.
What would you do if you did not know the way home? This essay is about two young men who, on the surface, are totally different but have one thing that binds them together, their hatred of adults.
The purpose of this essay is to compare and analyze the two main characters in The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger and The Children’s Island by PC Jersild, to see what sets them apart
and what similarities they have. The reason for focusing on these two characters specifically is to see if a change in the nuclear family has any effect on the boys’ maturity.
In the analysis of the two main characters I will look at their family relations, what kind of relationship the boys have with their families and if that relationship has any effect on the boys’
lives. What are the effects of their family situation? Another aspect that I will look at is the environmental factor, which could possibly affect their development. What kind of effect does a big city have on a boy? Does it have any effect at all? I will also examine the boys’ attitudes towards their surroundings, to see if any of the aspects that I have mentioned have an affect on the boys’ attitudes towards society.
These two books were chosen because one hears a lot of talk about what constitutes a
nuclear family and what effect a single working parent can have on a child. In the 50s a nuclear
family consisted of a working father, a stay at home mother and two children. Today that image
of a nuclear family has altered. Nowadays a nuclear family just as often consists of a working,
single parent with at least two children or more. Even the age of youth has changed. In the past
one could with certainty say that puberty started at the age of 16 – 17. Today that age has
dropped to the age of 13 – 14.
1The essay will start with a short summary of The Catcher in the Rye followed by an analysis of Holden. It will then move on to The Children’s Island and an analysis of Reine.
1 http://user.tninet.se/~qjv588m/tomas_ziehe.htm, 3.13.2003, 11:45am
The Catcher in the Rye
An understanding of The Catcher in the Rye must begin with Holden Caulfield, who is the catcher, the narrator, the protagonist – the reality of the novel. With a few possible
exceptions (…), nothing in the story is of importance except in its relationship to him. (…) Holden so occupies the center of attention that other characters do not really emerge from the story.2
There are a lot of things that Holden Caulfield, age 16, does not like. He hates actors, rich lawyers, golf players and those who brag about how much mileage they can get out of their cars.
He thinks that grown-ups are dishonest and fake, he feels nauseated when people use words such as “wonderful”, “great”, or “grand”
3Mr Spencer, the history teacher, is not only “a phoney slob”
4but also, according to Holden, also very malicious. “I flunked you in history because you knew absolutely nothing.”
5Even though Spencer keeps embarrassing Holden by reading aloud from his failed paper “out of a childish need for personal justification”
6Holden has too much respect for the older man and takes responsibility for his own failure and he sees that Mr Spencer feels bad for flunking him. By protecting his teacher’s feelings Holden is acting like Mr Spencer’s catcher in the rye:
I told him I would’ve done the same thing if I’d been in his place and how most people didn’t appreciate how tough it is being a teacher. That kind of stuff. The old bull. (...) I could shoot the old bull to old Spence and think about those ducks at the same time. It’s funny. You don’t have to think too hard when you talk to a teacher.7
Holden is the main character in JD Salinger’s book, The Catcher in the Rye. The book is about the three days that Holden spends by himself in New York City. It all starts when Holden gets expelled from yet another boarding school for flunking 4 out of 5 subjects. He also knows that it will take 3 days before his parents are aware of the fact that he has been expelled from Pencey
2 Lettis, Richard The Catcher in the Rye, New York: Barron’s Educational series 1964:3.
3 Salinger, JD, The Catcher in the Rye, Boston: Little, Brown and Company 1951:14
4 Salinger, 1951:7
5 Salinger, 1951:15
6 Baumbach, Jonathan, The Saint as a Young Man: The Catcher in the Rye by J.D Salinger, The Landscape of Nightmare, Twentieth-Century American Literature vol. 7, S - Z, New York: Chelsea House Publisher, 1988:3508
7 Salinger, 1951:17
thanks to school bureaucracy. Three days of freedom. Since Holden feels that there is no sense in staying at Pencey because there is hardly anyone worth knowing there he sets off to New York by himself:
‘Since 1888 we have been moulding boys into splendid, clear-thinking young men.’ Strictly for the birds. They didn’t do any damn more moulding at Pencey than they do at any other school. And I didn’t know anybody there that was splendid and clear-thinking and all.
Maybe two guys. If that many. And they probably came to Pencey that way.8
Holden takes the train to New York, where he checks into a cheap hotel, gets drunk for the first time, goes clubbing and fails to lose his virginity to a prostitute. He looks up friends, gets beaten up by a pimp, and thinks about life and love and the entire city of New York. The entire trip ends with Holden being in the same state of mind as at the beginning of the book. As the days go by, Holden becomes more and more depressed and lonely. He does not have the strength to think about his future. The only thing he really likes is the children, because they are natural. The only one he told about his dreams for the future was his younger sister, Phoebe. He does not want to get a fancy education; instead he wants to become a catcher in the rye, someone who saves the children from the corruption of the adult world:
I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all.
Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around (…) except me. And I’m standing on the ridge of some crazy cliff. (…) I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff – I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I do all day. I’d be the catcher in the rye and all. (…) but it’s the only thing I’d really like to be.9
While telling his story, Holden has been institutionalised at a psychiatric ward after being, as usual, disrespectful to people.
10However despite all his dark thoughts the story ends on a positive note. Holden manages to achieve harmony and happiness through Phoebe. She is his lifeline to the rest of the world. Through her letters about ordinary and everyday experiences Holden sees
8 Salinger, 1951:6
9 Salinger, 1951:180.
10 Smith, Harrison, Saturday Review of Literature, 14.6.1951
that not everybody is mean and evil. Holden has a romantic picture of how childhood should look like and he thinks that Phoebe is this picture, that she is childhood personified.
Holden Caulfield
Holden thinks of himself as an atheist and he often works things out by discussing his problems in life by talking to himself. Most of the time this makes him very depressed. He sees himself as a coward but we know that Holden is anything but a coward. When Jane (a friend of Holden’s) is in danger (or so Holden thinks) Holden doesn’t stop from attacking his roommate, Stradlater, who is Holden’s superior physically. “We were practically the same height, but he weighed twice as much as I did. He had these very broad shoulders.”
11Instead of becoming a lawyer like his father, Holden wants to become a catcher in the rye.
A catcher is someone who catches the children as they come through the rye and falls off the cliff. The rye and the cliff symbolize how the children fall from the innocence of childhood (coming through the rye) and into the corrupt adult world (falling off the cliff). He does not want to let the children go through the same things that he went through and is still going through so he thinks that they need someone to catch them and guide them on their way to adulthood. Holden himself could do with such a catcher. His self-esteem’s increased vulnerability makes Holden identify with the children. But before he can save anybody else Holden himself needs saving.
12He refers to himself as the “the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life.”
13He lies to a class friend’s mother when he tells her that he has to have brain surgery:
I have to have this operation. (…) It isn’t very serious. I have this tiny little tumour on the brain. (…) I’ll be all right and everything! It’s right near the outside. And it’s a very tiny
11 Salinger, 1951:29
12 Ziehe Thomas, Kulturanalyser: ungdom, utbildning, modernitet, Stockholm: Brutus Östlings bokf. Symposion 1994:41
13 Salinger, 1951:20
one. They can take it out in about two minutes. Then I started reading this timetable I had in my pocket. Just to stop lying. Once I get started, I can go on for hours if I feel like it. No kidding. Hours.14
Holden has a lot of problems with his self-perception because he has not found his own identity.
He idolizes childhood with its innocence and honesty and is afraid of the adult world, which he thinks contains depressing things such as falsehood. At the same time as Holden is afraid of it, he also wants to become an adult, something he tries to achieve by losing his virginity.
15It does not turn out quite the way he thought it would, because the prostitute’s pimp cheats him. The adult world and its false goodness disgust Holden but at the same time he does not want to be a child that adults can control. You could say that Holden is balancing on the thin line between two worlds that seem incompatible.
Family relations
Holden’s family consists of two parents and two siblings. The older brother, DB, to borrow Holden’s expression, is a “prostitute” (he writes movie scripts). “Now he’s out in Hollywood, DB, being a prostitute. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s the movies. Don’t even mention them to me.”
16The younger sister, Phoebe, goes to boarding school in New York. He also had a younger brother, Allie, who died of leukemia. Phoebe is the person who, besides Holden, plays a key part in the story. She is the most important person in Holden’s life. Phoebe represents innocence, purity and love, all of Holden’s ideals. She is the one he turns to with his problems.
Materially speaking, neither Holden nor his brother or sister lack anything. Holden’s father is a successful lawyer who spends most of his time at work. This in turn leads to him trying to ease his guilty conscience, of not spending enough time with his children, by giving his children
14 Salinger, 1951:62
15 Ziehe, 1994:35
16 Salinger, 1951:5
money and things instead of love and time. They are well dressed and well equipped to take on the world. But emotionally it is a whole different thing. Holden gets no support from his parents and there is no talk of love or other emotions in the house.
17Attitudes
Holden has a strong attitude towards certain things and he tries to defend himself to the best of his abilities whenever he is attacked. But he does not have enough courage to succeed with it.
He goes through life with a sarcastic and critical, often melancholy, attitude towards most things and people. To adapt into already made patterns is not something Holden would do. He has taken it upon himself to live a life outside society. This choice was made because the alternatives were far worse, namely a society full of false and nasty people who, according to Holden, represent something he is afraid of becoming. He is not sure that he can grow up without losing his values.
Influences from his environment
Holden’s surroundings have a rather negative impact on him. All the evil, but also tragic people around the world often depress him. However, Holden also meets some people that give him a lot of positive feelings; among others Holden meets two very unselfish nuns. These two women, who are trying to collect money for the needy, are individuals that Holden will never forget. He can talk to them without getting phoney answers. When Phoebe asks him what he likes, Holden first thinks of the two nuns, but he also thinks of James Castle. Castle is a boy who Holden knew from Pencey. He was a very small, thin boy who had high principles, principles that came with a very high price. Castle refused to take back something he said to some bullies. This
17 Ziehe, 1994:19-20
refusal earned him a severe beating. In the end the bullying and the beatings were so bad that Castle killed himself by jumping out of a window instead of going back on his principles.
18Mr Antolini, the English teacher, is someone else that Holden likes and he has spent many nights at Mr Antolini’s. They had many discussions about how difficult it is growing up and Mr Antolini tries to give Holden some strength:
Among other things, you’ll find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behaviour. You’re by no means alone on that score; you’ll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them – if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn’t education. It’s history. It’s poetry.19
The suicide of James Castle, one of Holden’s classmates at Pencey, has always been on Holden’s mind and he turns to Mr Antolini because he hopes that Mr Antolini will catch him before he is forever lost. Holden is still one of the children running through the rye. This is one of Holden’s biggest problems in life. To protect the children he must leave his childhood, but he resists moving into adulthood because those who are not innocent any longer are corrupt and foolish.
Before he can become a catcher in the rye another catcher has to show him the way.
20“The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mature man wants to live humbly for one.”
21None of this is of any use for Holden, who simply wants to know what makes him find so many people false and morally bad. Whatever effect Mr Antolini’s wisdom might have had is ruined when Holden wakes up in horror to find, after spending the night at Mr Antolini’s, Mr Antolini sitting on his bed stroking Holden’s hair.
22Holden believes that Mr Antolini would have helped him a lot by sharing his visions and company. Mr Antolini’s homosexual interest in Holden is the final straw in a long line of disillusionments. Holden loses
18 Salinger, 1951:153
19 Salinger, 1951:196
20 Baumbach, 1988:3508
21 Salinger, 1951:195
all respect for Mr Antolini. Losing Mr Antolini is to Holden like losing God, his only good father figure or so he thinks. His only means of survival is to retreat into his fantasy world of childhood and deeper into his psychosis:
23There was this magazine that somebody’d left on the bench next to me, so I started reading it, thinking it’d make me stop thinking about Mr Antolini (...) this damn article I started to read made me feel almost worse. It was all about hormones. It described how you should look (...) if your hormones were in good shape (...) I looked exactly like the guy in the article with lousy hormones. Then I read this other article about how you can tell if you have cancer or not. It said if you had any sores in your moth that didn’t heal pretty quickly it was a sign that you probably had cancer. I’d had this sore on the inside of my lip for about two weeks. So I figured I was getting cancer.24
Phoebe is the one that never lets Holden down, and in the end she is Holden’s catcher in the rye.
She is his guiding light and puts an end to his depressive plans by forcing her company upon him.
She saves his life by totally ruining his plans for hitchhiking out West.
25
22 Smith, 1951
23 Baumbach, 1988:3508
24 Salinger, 1951:202
25 Salinger, 1951:212 - 214
The Children’s Island
“This was his first day of freedom, almost the first day of his life that he was not dependent on what everyone else wanted.”
26The Children’s Island is about 11-year-old Reine who,
according to his mother’s plans, has to spend the summer at a camp called the Children’s Island, while she is away on holiday. But Reine has other plans; he does not want to spend, perhaps, his last summer before puberty in a children’s camp. He plans to stay in the city and has prepared his deception very carefully.
Reine pretends to leave, but will stay on his own in Stockholm. He writes a letter to Harriet, his mother, in order to keep her calm saying how everything at the camp is great. To the camp leaders he writes that he is unable to attend camp due to appendicitis:
For at least the tenth time, he read: I have to inform you that Reine Larsson 640909-1152 has appendicitis. He cannot come to Children’s Island. If any letters come to him, please forward them to Reine Larsson (...) The only part he was truly satisfied with was Mom’s forged signature, much more stylish than the original.27
Reine has no stable adult role model in his life. He has no father and his mother works a lot to be able to support herself and Reine. Still, he shows signs of intelligence when he comes up with his ingenious plan to stay home alone instead of going to camp, which is something a lot of children only dream of doing.
Reine’s first step towards joining the adult world is to get a job. With only 33 SEK in his pocket there is a great chance that Reine will starve, so he manages to get a job at Madame Olga’s. She runs a company that manufactures funeral wreaths. Reine clearly demonstrates his ability to take care of himself when confronted by, sometimes, unsolvable and often violent problems:
The next second he was hit by a violent slap that knocked him to the floor. During the fall he tore
26 Jersild, PC, Barnens Ö, Stockholm: Bonniers 1976:13. My translation
27 Jersild, 1976:8, My translation
up a wound on the shift stick. (...) What had happened? He had committed an unforgivable crime.
He had on his own accord gotten into the leader’s car. And he didn’t sit in the backseat but in the driver’s seat. (...) He waited until the Opel drove away and the bikers returned to what they were doing before: to the car engines, to the improvised dancing and the beer drinking. He didn’t think he had anything else to lose, and got out of the Thunderbird.28
Ironically enough this whole charade ends with Reine at the hospital for the very thing he lied about - appendicitis.
29Reine Larsson
“Who am I? I am Reine Agne Larsson, 640909-1152. Why? Because my mother dated a man at the beginning of December in 1963. Maybe on Lucia? It does not matter; Harriet had never told him the time and place.”
30Rene is a positive boy who goes out into the world with sheer curiosity. While he finds out about life, he also tries to take care of himself on his own. The only person that Reine does not trust in this world is his mother's boyfriend, Stig. Reine feels that Stig is an untrustworthy and not a very nice person. But he is also the one that feeds Reine when Madame Olga’s has closed for the general industrial holiday.
He has realized that the adults in his surroundings are not going to be able to help him answer a few existential questions. So he has to do it by himself before the first sign of pubic hair because Reine's biggest fear in life is that he one day will be an adult. Reine has come to the conclusion that pubic hair is something he has to avoid at all costs, as it leads to puberty – the first step towards entering the adult world.
31Everyday he checks himself for pubic hair, and every day he is happy that he cannot find any:
The day you find yourself in puberty is the day you will have lost everything. You will be dragged into the adult world and there would be no turning back. You would be so caught up in all the adult horniness and other filthy adult things that one's thoughts would never be clean again. All energy would be diverted into getting laid, nothing would be left for
28 Jersild, 1976:218 – 219, My translation
29 Jersild, 1976:299
30 Jersild, 1976:20 My translation
31 Ziehe, 1994:35
solving mysteries such as: does God really exist, and if so, how did it sound when he created Adam?32
Reine is an intelligent child that in many ways acts like an adult. He can be very mature, but sometimes his more naive side reveals itself, the side that holds his dreams, hopes and expectations but sadly that side often collides with the harsh and, sometimes, cruel reality.
33Angels, heaven and hell are things Reine broods about very much, but he is also very imaginative and practical. He buys himself a bus pass that allows him to not only ride the buses but also the Metro. “When he had planned for this summer of freedom he soon realised that he just couldn’t stay in Sollentuna when looking for the meaning of life. It meant a lot of
travelling.”
34Reine decides to find out what is important in life, to seek answers to some very big
questions such as: does God exist and if so has anyone seen him? And if there is a God - does the devil also exist? Reine’s grandmother is convinced that hell truly exists, but Harriet, his mother, is of another opinion. Granny seems to be the only adult in Reine’s life that ever talks about difficult things such as hell, God and Jesus. Her description of hell has scared Reine a lot, but at the same time he is not sure if he should believe anything that she tells him:
In hell there were thousand of different methods of torture: (...) the water test, the iron lady, the Spanish boot, melted lead down your throat. (...) he did not quite believe Granny, because if hell really existed it had to be a lot scarier than any human being could ever imagine. Otherwise there would be no difference between life on earth and life in hell.35
32 Jersild, 1976:22. My translation
33 Hansson, Inga-Britt, Bra och roligt – men det stämmer inte, Göteborgs Tidningen, 24.9.1976
34 Jersild, 1976:16 My translation
35 Jersild, 1976:11 My translation
Family relations
Reine's family consists entirely of Reine and his mother, Harriet. The lack of a father figure is the downside to Reine's social situation. Harriet never tells Reine who his father is. To be honest, Reine is not sure that even his mother knows who his father really is. Who one’s father is, is a very important question for an 11-year old boy. To understand one’s heritage is to understand oneself. Reine looks up the word father in The Guinness Book of World Records but
unfortunately he does not find his answer. Instead, Reine fantasizes a lot about who his father might be. At the top of the list is Dag Hammarskjöld.
36Reine is almost sure that his father is Dag Hammarskjöld, because it all fits:
Hammarskjöld had died sometime at the beginning of the 60s. But before he bought it he had made Reine. It all fit, Mom had vaguely talked about that man that had “gone away” and would be gone for a very long time. (...) There were pictures of Hammarskjöld in school; he had light hair, a small nose just like Reine and cheek pouches, guinea pig like cheeks. And further more he looked unreliable, like someone who would make a woman pregnant and then go to America.37
Reine often wonders why adults bring children into the world. He thinks that one of the reasons is that the adults need someone to oppress and to steal the child’s alimony check. “But a check-up was good, all parents should be checked out not just foster parents. His mother for example...No, that was unfair”
38Yet again, Reine turns to The Guinness Book of World Records, but still the book cannot provide him with the answer that he needs so he quickly abandons the book.
Harriet’s taste in men is not the best and Stig is just another example of an unsympathetic and obnoxious person that no woman with half a brain would choose. Stig is an alcoholic
ambulance driver who on a few occasions has been violent towards Harriet. But Harriet is also a single mother with a pre-teen son, which makes her extremely vulnerable and exposed. He occupies their apartment without any signs of embarrassment and in general behaves very badly
36 Dag Hammarskjöld, Secretary-General of the United Nations 1953 – 1961. Died in 1961 while on peacekeeping mission in the Congo. http://un.org/Depts/dhl/dag/bio.html, 3.12.2002, 7:36pm
37 Jersild, 1976:21 My translation
38 Jersild, 1976:21 My translation
towards Reine. The ladies at Madame Olga’s become Reine’s second family during the summer.
One of them is Helene, who is in a wheelchair. Reine is afraid of becoming like Helene, stared at and lonely. “Should he kill Helene out of kindness? It couldn’t be any fun sitting in a wheelchair.
To always be in the way and stared at or not stared at (…) but did Helene want to die?”
39So far Reine has only thought about the problem of suffering but never told anyone about his thoughts. As the story continues Reine meets Nora at the perfume counter at NK’s. Even though she is not related by blood or marriage she is the only adult that Reine opens up to.
Together they discuss the permanent solution of suffering. “If all the bombs in the world would detonate at the same time, there would be no one left to grieve. It was ingenious, the answer to all the questions at the same time. Someone has to take it upon himself to blow up the world as a favour to humanity.”
40Reine feels that this, if anything, would be an unselfish act and anyone who would do it would become some sort of saviour.
Attitudes
Like many other people, Reine is balanced between deep depression and divine happiness.
He is a boy with a very strong belief in himself, a belief so strong that it makes him accomplish things and not stop at the first sight of difficulties. By nature, Reine is a kind boy with a positive attitude towards his surroundings even when faced with great difficulties. Violence and
destructiveness are two words that do not seem to exist in Reine’s vocabulary. He has noticed that kindness and co-operation will get you a long way.
39 Jersild, 1976:85 My translation
40 Jersild, 1976:282 My translation
Influences from his environment
For Reine’s development it is essential that adults, who accept him for who he is, surround him. Nora is like no other grown-up that Reine has ever met. She listens to him and trusts him.
Nora also teaches Reine that he has to take his feelings seriously. According to Nora, Reine has to learn to talk about his thoughts and feelings even though they can sometimes be very
complicated and confusing. Reine is both a very adult child and an extremely childish adult
41His thoughts are very advanced one minute and the next his insecurity shines through. Reine’s
feelings are easily hurt and he often cries. His biggest problem in life is that he will one day become an adult and to him that would mean total chaos. It is important for him to remain a child for as long as possible. He does not know how much time he has left before he reaches puberty, which means that he has to make the most of this summer because it could very well be his last as a child.
Other people that have an impact on Reine’s life are the insufferable Stig, the friendly Madame Olga, the bikers that destroyed his bike and the criminal boys that make Reine taste alcohol for the first time. All of these people have, in his/her own way, taught Reine something about life without him losing his identity.
We get to follow Reine’s development from an innocent child to adult life through all of his sufferings and betrayal. Because of his mother’s betrayal Reine tries to find a substitute mother in the ladies at Madame Olga’s. His need for affection makes him fantasize about a “special body part just for affections”
42, that all people should have. It shows clearly that Reine is just a child looking for some love, but because of his surroundings and his mother’s betrayal the fantasizing starts and he is aware of the fact that the adults cannot be trusted.
Reine adopts a wait-and-see position when he meets people for the first time and the fear of
41 Hansson, 24.9.1976
his surroundings is clearly shown. Reine is forced by society to grow up too quickly by always having to be on his guard. His fear of his surroundings makes him feel so unsafe that he is even on his guard around people he knows. That is why Reine starts to daydream about power. He thinks that if he is powerful the grown-ups will respect him and therefore he will be safe and escape all psychological suffering.
The Children’s Island reflects a child’s reality as surrounded by violence and the adults have an invisible fence that you learn not to crash into because then you could get hit.
43Because Reine is so often hurt and betrayed the violence soon becomes something that happens everyday and the only rescue is to fantasize. Reine soon starts to feel that betrayal is something natural and that is a cruel way for a child to mature.
Amongst all misery and despair there is a small glimmer of hope, as once again Nora is there for Reine. She becomes the first adult that Reine can completely trust. Nora treats him with respect. By allowing Reine to work through his feelings with her, he grows emotionally. Step by step Reine approaches the adult world and leaves his childhood behind him.
44At the beginning of the summer Reine believes that summer equals total freedom, but eventually he learns that sometimes freedom also means loneliness. His bitter experience with loneliness has convinced him that freedom is not worth its price and that loneliness is not the same as freedom. To avoid loneliness Reine seeks the company of other people, but unfortunately most of them turn out to be evil or have evil intentions. Reine, in his efforts to make contact with other people, automatically adjusts his personality to fit in with a gang that behaves in an
uncivilized and violent manner:
Edsel made no attempt to pay he just walked by. Reine went after him – there was nothing else to do. He looked around; all the other bikers had also walked by. The man at the box-office had already closed. (...) Hester started to eat hot dogs with mashed potatoes without paying. More of
42Jersild, 1976:143 My translation
43 Fransén, Lars-Olov, Barnens Ö, Dagens Nyheter, 24.9.1976
44 Franzén, 1976
the bikers got in line at the hot dog stand. The man tried to close but a couple of the bikers started to rock the stand. (...) When the bikers had left the stand Reinewent over to find something to eat.
(...) He grabbed a bag of mashed potatoes and ran from the stand.45
This could be interpreted as if somehow Reine has a longing inside to submit to those who are the strongest, that he finds some pleasure in surrounding himself with these uncivilised and violent people. No matter how they treat him, he keeps coming back to them.
46Reine’s loneliness and difficulty in making contact seem to have something to do with the fact that Reine does not know whom his father is. This would be one of the reasons why he has trouble opening up to other people.
In the beginning Reine handles his loneliness quite well, because he withdraws from all strange people. But eventually he starts to connect with other people and towards the end of the book he returns to his mother because he no longer has the strength to be on his own. The tragic solution is to be reconciled with his mother to avoid loneliness.
47
45 Jersild, 1976:212 – 214. My translation
46 Airas, Charlotte, Jersild i barnens värld, Nya Argus, 1977:2
47 Franzén, 1976
