Child's Play

From Enoch Emery in Wise Blood to Miles and Flora in Henry James’s Turn of the Screw, young people in fiction are often privileged interpreters of reality. Maybe it’s the absence of an ideology—their decidedly direct, if not always innocent, take on things. Kids might not always see things clearly, but they do say clearly what it is they think they see. The childlike Enoch sees a mummy and declares it “the new Jesus.” Oskar in Günter Grass’s The...

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