We know that the formative years can make and shape and break a person, that everything that happens in childhood has an echo later in life, and this, too, exposes the fragility of child narrators.īut in literature, at least, children who are subjected to trauma are uniquely positioned to transcend their circumstances,and to give their readers a sense that it will all be okay in the end. In many ways, they expose fundamental truths about life: the fact that not all childhoods are good, that not all children are able to retain their innocence. They are forced to grow up too soon, to take on adult responsibilities, to find their way in a hostile world. While their youth positions them as innocents, child narrators are frequently far from naïve: they may be abandoned or orphaned, exposed to danger and violence. We feel a natural affinity toward them, a sense of compassion, because there is a universality to children and to childhood, and we were all children once. Even at their most precocious, even at their worst, children are likeable and relatable. They can be wise beyond their years, and also desperately vulnerable. They are forced to grow up too soon, to take on adult responsibilities, to find their way in a hostile world.Ĭhild narrators can be unselfconscious and bracingly honest, and also the opposite: the keeper of secrets, the teller of tales. While their youth positions them as innocents, child narrators are frequently far from naïve. Often this makes them profoundly insightful and aware, and even if they don’t comprehend everything that happens around them, they are keen observers of it all. They are instinctive in their understanding of things, and in their reactions. Children can say anything-often things adults cannot-because they feel first and process later. Children’s minds work differently to those of adults it’s the way they make sense of the world, the way a child’s own small world is the whole world and at the same time, an ever-evolving concept, as they learn and grow and change by the day.Ĭhildren experience life with a certain rawness, an urgency of emotion. Their imaginations are wild and wonderful, untethered to the constraints of reality or logic. Perhaps it’s because children are such natural storytellers and inventors of worlds. There’s a particular magic, I think, which children bring to a novel, a poignancy and a power. And it seemed from the start that the person to tell it was seven-year-old Dolly Rust. The story, which begins as an exciting father and daughter road trip and grows steadily more ominous, is a story of lost innocence and broken dreams, of a childhood abruptly ended. I didn’t set out to have a child narrator in my own novel, All the Lost Things, but it happened anyway, as if instinctively. I can clearly recall the tone of their voices, the inventiveness of their language, the way their stories are so frequently heartbreaking and hopeful at the same time. I can remember these children of fiction in ways I often can’t remember adults. I’m certain they do exist, somewhere out there, but the ones I’ve encountered over the years are up there with some of my favorite and most memorable reads. I’ve never met a child narrator I didn’t like.
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