Charles: Summary & Analysis

Beginning

Laurie starts kindergarten and immediately changes: he becomes insolent at home, stops using baby talk, slams doors, speaks rudely to his father. Every day he reports on Charles — hitting the teacher, throwing chalk, refusing to do anything he is told. The parents discuss Charles at dinner with fascinated horror.

Rising action

The Charles reports continue for weeks. Some weeks Charles is worse; occasionally he is better — he apologises to the teacher, he is made a helper. The mother notes that on good Charles weeks, Laurie seems more manageable at home. The mother is increasingly curious about Charles's parents and what they must be like.

Ending

At the PTA meeting, the mother looks around for Charles's mother without success. She finds the teacher and asks about Charles. The teacher says she has no boy named Charles in her class. The mother goes home.

Laurie / Charles

Laurie is the story's central presence and its hidden subject. Jackson gives him one physical detail that should be a clue: on the first day of school, he leaves without looking back. He returns a swaggering, rude, loud person. The Charles stories are his reports on his own behaviour, projected onto an invented classmate — a psychological defence that lets him tell his parents the truth while maintaining deniability.

The mother

The mother's comfortable self-satisfaction — her certainty that Charles is someone else's problem, her fascination with Charles's presumably inadequate parents — is what makes the ending land. She has spent weeks constructing a picture of a bad child and his bad parents, and has not noticed that her son's home behaviour has been deteriorating in exact correlation with Charles's school behaviour.

Parental self-deception

The mother's failure to identify Charles as Laurie is not stupidity but motivated blindness: it is more comfortable to be fascinated by a bad child who is someone else's than to recognise him as your own. Jackson makes the clues available — the correlation between Charles weeks and Laurie's home behaviour, Laurie's swagger and rudeness — but surrounds them with the mother's confident, unexamined narration.

The invented other

Laurie's invention of Charles is a child's psychological sophistication: he has found a way to tell his parents the truth about what he is doing at school without taking responsibility for it. Charles is Laurie's alter ego and his alibi simultaneously. Jackson presents this without analysis — the story simply ends at the moment of revelation, leaving the mother's response entirely to the reader's imagination.

Jackson's comic mode

The story sits in a different register from Jackson's horror work — The Lottery and The Possibility of Evil — but shares the same interest in comfortable people who do not see what is directly in front of them. Here the effect is comedy; elsewhere it is terror. Jackson's insight is that the psychological mechanism is the same.