Foreshadowing In Charles By Shirley Jackson

Children Are Smarter Than You May Realize: A Literary Analysis of “Charles”

When you think about the author Shirley Jackson, you probably think of the horror stories she has written like “The Lottery”. It might surprise you, but Jackson stepped away from the genre of horror for a while when she wrote the short story “Charles”. In 1848, around the same time Shirley Jackson started having children, is when she started shifting her writing to more family stories (Bloom). Even though Jackson will probably be remembered for her Horror stories, “Charles has become a favorite with anthologists” (LeCroy). The short story, Charles is about a boy named Laurie who starts kindergarten and comes home to tell his family about the day-to-day chaos of ill-behaved

Even in the first paragraph when Laurie’s mother is describing him as a “sweet-voiced nursery-school tot has been replaced by a long-trousered, swaggering character who forgot to wave goodbye” (Jackson) as he was headed off to kindergarten. This shows that even before Laurie even gets to the school his behavior starts to shift. As the reader continues to read the text the reader can sense subtle clues that Laurie is changing by the way Laurie starts talking and acting. Laurie starts yelling when he gets home from school like when he yells “Charles was bad again” (Jackson). The way Laurie is talking shows that Laurie is changing. He is not the “sweet-voiced nursery-school tot” (Jackson) anymore. When Laurie arrived home after the first day of kindergarten, “He came home the same way he left, the front door slamming open, his cap thrown on the floor” (Jackson). At the beginning of the story Laurie was a sweet well-behaved boy, this type of behavior would not be expected from him. These incidents foreshadow that Laurie is going to be a different boy at the end of the story than at the

Throughout the text a big symbol that stands out is Laurie’s behavior: the way he talks to his father when he asks him a question, the way he calls his father ugly names “Hi pop, y’old dust mop” (Jackson). The name-calling symbolizes that Laurie is not a sweet little boy anymore. “At Lunch, Laurie spoke insolently to his father, and spilled his baby sister’s milk” (Jackson). Laurie talking rudely to his father and spilling his sister’s milk shows that he is starting to disrespect his elders. Laurie’s parents brush off the bad behavior and excuse it by saying that “I suppose that it’s from Charles' bad influence” (Jackson). Which could be possible, but the parents should have taught Laurie that Charles behavior is not nice and that we do not behave that way. When the teacher mentioned that there was not a Charles in the class and that Laurie had a rough patch when it came to behavior at school, it became obvious that Laurie was