The Complexity of the Concept of Child

In I Was a Rat
In the story, I Was a Rat (Pullman, 1999) the child is depicted as having a lower agency, therefore, must understand and practise various signifying norms in order to achieve his own identity. Despite his insistence on that he was a rat, Roger has to attain the quality of being an individual person. This starts from the outset of the story when Bob and Joan first encounter him and ask, “who are you?”[1] The word ‘who’ sighnifies that his initial recognition is intrinsically subject to the assumption of personhood. The story says that as a social identity the boy is moved by the “powerful vehicle”[2] of ideology to naming, manners, school, orphanage, cave, and cobbling.

The story provides some definitions of Roger, from various angles by different people, but more importantly, it leaves Roger uncertain about the definition of himself. For Bob and Joan, he is “the little boy”[3], for the doctor “normal healthy boy”[4], for the Philosopher Royal “insane, paranoid”[5], for The Daily Scourge “the monster”[6], and for the princes “Ratty.”[7] Buckingham defines childhood as “the outcome of social and discursive processes,”[8] likewise, in I Was a Rat some contradictory definitions discursively engage in shaping Roger’s identity.

Through dissimilar definitions of Roger, the story reflects upon the idea of childhood as a social construction as well as its various aspects of biological determination as a child. Although Roger decides to be a cobbler, he still admits having “less trouble being a rat.”[9] This uncertainty implies that the story is to explore the further ontological question of ‘who am I?’ Roger’s childhood seems more complex than originally assumed, but when the story blends this complexity to eternal questions of being, it problematise the concept of the child even more.

Bibliography 

Buckingham, David. After the Death of Childhood: Growing Up in the Age of Electronic Media, Polity Press, Oxford, 2000.

Pullman, Philip, and Bailey, Peter, Illustrator. I Was a Rat: Or, The Scarlet Slippers. London: Doubleday. 1999.

Rudd, David. The Routledge Companion to Children's Literature. Florence: Routledge Companions. 2010.

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[1] Pullman, I Was a Rat, 2.

[2] Rudd, The Routledge Companion to Children's Literature, 192.

[3] Ibid., I Was a Rat, 8.

[4] Ibid., 32.

[5] Ibid., 63.

[6] Ibid., 143.

[7] Ibid., 196.

[8] Buckingham, After the Death of Childhood, 7.

[9] Ibid., I Was a Rat, 207.