Charles

The titular character is a made-up boy in Laurie’s kindergarten class. Insofar as he is a shadowy extension of Laurie’s psyche, and insofar as Laurie is the protagonist, Charles is a second protagonist. He is also the central subject of conversation for Laurie’s family. In fact, despite his unreality, his presence is so powerful that his name enters the family lexicon: The narrator remarks that Charles becomes an “institution” in the family as they all begin referring to mischievous behavior as “being a Charles” (75).

Though he operates as both a motif and a character, the latter reading presents unique mysteries. In terms of character arc, there are different ways to parse Charles. He starts out troublesome, suffers fleeting normality, and wholeheartedly returns to devilry; in this sense, his arc is circular. However, despite Charles’s fleeting normality—the brief “reformation” where he becomes the “teacher’s helper”—the narrative never reveals what instigates this shift. The reader knows only that when Laurie reports the change, he is “grim,” which only accentuates the gleefulness that typifies his accounts of Charles’s less benign comportment. Assuming Charles is Laurie’s fictionalized self, a logical inference is that something happened to Laurie, probably at school, causing him to briefly (if begrudgingly) change his ways. Alternatively, Laurie may have grown bored with his usual mischief, or perhaps he wishes to throw his parents and other adults off the scent of his deception. Regardless of its cause, the reform does not last, as the next week finds Charles returning to his shenanigans. 

Laurie’s mother, never otherwise named, is the narrator of the story. She may seem to be an unreliable narrator, as she is given information about Charles through Laurie, who is himself unreliable. However, strictly speaking, she narrates the story in the past tense, after learning of Charles’s nonexistence—so her chronicle is ultimately a reliable account of her own past delusion. She relays fully and factually what Laurie told her and what she felt at the time, but she reveals her son’s mendacity only when the story reaches the point at which she herself discovered it; until then, her audience may believe, as the narrator herself did, that Charles is real.

In the “present” of the story’s events, when the narrator still believes her son’s concoction, her credulity reflects her naiveté and hubris: Her naiveté is in her habitual failure to question her son’s trustworthiness despite his abrasively contrary behavior at home, while her hubris is in her unthinking judgment of Charles’s mother. Because both her naiveté and hubris rely on ignorance, they both create irony—and the narrator is a vessel for the story’s deepest ironies. The story opens with the narrator bittersweetly watching her young son as he outgrows his corduroys and stops saying goodbye as he leaves for school. This is the first irony. The narrator laments her “sweet-voiced” son’s recent departure from innocent youth, but it is dubious whether Laurie was so recently as sweet or innocent as the narrator then believes; later that same day, he returns from school and is promptly rude if not outright callous, spilling his baby sister’s milk and, presumably without provocation, speaking impudently to his father. As the story progresses and Laurie tells his parents stories about Charles, the narrator worries that “kindergarten is too unsettling for Laurie” (74). The irony now is that Laurie is the one who “unsettles” the other children, not to mention his teachers.

The illusory Charles also leads into the story’s most pointed and personal irony: the narrator’s frequent reproofs of Charles’s mother, who, the narrator and her husband believe, must be the fountainhead of the varmint’s delinquency. The irony, of course, is that the narrator’s judgment is ultimately a self-indictment. It is she who is “Charles’s” mother. The narrative slowly builds up to this skewering, repeatedly showing the complacent assumptions of Laurie’s parents, who speak of Charles’s mother almost as though she’s a scientific specimen they are desperate to observe. When the teacher reveals the truth—that there is no Charles in the kindergarten—the narrative ends abruptly and, therefore, never shows the narrator’s reaction. Nevertheless, because she narrates the story in the past tense, this narrative situation presupposes that she eventually finds the self-reflection and humility to document her past indiscretion. This accords with how her rendering of the events makes no pretext for her moral failures.