58 pages • 1 hour read
Dave PelzerA Child Called It: One Child’s Courage to Survive
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1995A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Symbols & Motifs
Nostalgia
Throughout the book Pelzer’s nostalgia serves as a foil to his extreme tragedy. It represents moments of light in an otherwise dark, bleak story. Even in the face of extreme pain, young Dave holds on to the memory and hope of a loving family. Writing as an adult, Pelzer still maintains some nostalgia for his early childhood, allowing these good memories to exist alongside the bad. This full trajectory of Pelzer’s childhood allows the reader to follow the progress of the family’s deterioration into abuse. Dave Pelzer’s ability to cherish good memories about his mother accentuate the book’s theme of the hidden underbelly of abuse. Even in Dave’s own mind, his mother’s abusive nature is somewhat hidden or shielded by his hope that she will one day revert to the loving mother he knew as a small boy.
The book also ends on a note of a nostalgia, when Dave returns to the scene of his happy childhood vacations on the Russian River with his own small son. In this moment of reflection Dave recalls all the good and bad that has occurred in his life. He remembers those golden early memories with his family at the Guerneville cabin. He marvels at his ability to overcome his abuse, which plays on the book’s theme of the resiliency of the human spirit. In the narrative’s closing moments, Pelzer holds the good with the bad to acknowledge his nostalgia while honoring his ability to endure pain.
Food
Food becomes a great obsession for Dave. Catherine uses food to control her sons. It is her greatest tool, both in her ability to produce it and take it away, and in the way she wields it as a weapon. For instance, in Chapter 4, after discovering that Dave has been stealing food from the trash, Catherine sprinkles ammonia in the garbage to ensure Dave will get sick from sneaking the food. Furthermore, when Dave steals hot dogs from the school cafeteria, Catherine forces him to throw up the food and then eat it (56). Catherine’s punishments around eating even extend to excrement. When the Pelzers are on vacation by the Russian River and the rest of the family is away, Catherine forces Dave to eat his infant brother Russell’s feces (48). Instances like these show how Catherine uses food to debase and dehumanize Dave.
Catherine also uses food to make Dave feel estranged from himself and the outside world. Lack of food causes Dave physical and mental weakness; it also ostracizes him from his peers and outside guardians, like the school staff. Dave’s desperation for food, and his subsequent theft of food from his peers and the cafeteria, confirms that he is a “bad boy” not only to his mother but also to the outside world.
Control
Throughout the book the Pelzer family is locked in a power struggle orchestrated by Catherine. Catherine takes pleasure in controlling the lives of Dave, her husband Stephen, and to a lesser extent, Dave’s brothers. The book’s central arc is driven by Dave’s attempts to reclaim some control over his life. Catherine’s early complaint about Dave is that he is “bad.” According to her, even from an early age Dave refuses to be disciplined and will not listen to her. This perceived lack of control prompts Catherine to spin into a cycle of child abuse toward Dave, which she justifies as strict and necessary parenting. These methods and rationale are reinforced by the way she instrumentalizes the rest of her family to participate in controlling Dave. For instance, Catherine enlists Stephen to shame Dave for his supposed bad behavior. Later in the book she allows her younger sons to enter and exit the bathroom where Dave is being punished by laying in cold water in the bathtub. Dave then devises small ways to usurp his mother’s power by delaying her punishments and conceiving elaborate strategies to survive. Stephen initially complies with these instances of torture masked as control. However, he eventually leaves Catherine, though this only increases her need to control Dave. This cycle of control is only broken when Dave is put in the care of Child Protective Services.
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