27 pages • 54 minutes read
Shirley JacksonCharles
Fiction | Short Story | YA | Published in 1948A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Imagery
Imagery is a literary device that allows writers to paint pictures in readers’ minds so they can more easily imagine a story’s characters, emotions, and settings. It involves descriptive language that elicits sensory experience and draws readers into the narrative world. In Literary Realism, authors tend to use sparing imagery, describing things briefly and as they are. This story’s limited imagery is among its chief stylistic earmarks of Realism, as “Charles” includes very little imagery. In fact, it includes almost no imagery at all, insofar as the narrator’s descriptions of the physical world are less evocative than utilitarian. Her descriptions mostly name objects that play into the plot’s logic; they show the reader what is happening and how it happens—not how it feels to be there amid the happening. However, a comparatively immersive description appears early: The story opens with the narrator’s description of her son, whom she remembers as “sweet-voiced” and wearing corduroys. These concrete details create meaning because they portray youthful innocence and help the reader experientially connect to that concept.
Foreshadowing
Foreshadowing is a literary technique used to hint at what will unfold in a story, such as future events, connections, or outcomes. The story has a very subtle bit of foreshadowing that hints at the revelation that Charles is not a real child. This comes early on, in the second week of kindergarten, when Laurie comes home on Monday and his parents ask why he’s late. He tells his parents about how Charles was made to stay after school for being bad “and so all the children stayed to watch him” (74). Laurie uses this as an excuse for why he is home late, but in reality, he is home late because he was the one that was bad at school and had to stay to face his own punishment. Foreshadowing entails an appreciable effect on reader expectation or suspicion, and such suspicion may arise in readers who discern these small but cumulative coincidences or discrepancies. A similar instance is when Laurie’s father asks him about Charles’s last name and Laurie never answers.
Anecdote
Anecdotes are small stories that recount interesting or informative events—sometimes to make a point or express an idea, but oftentimes for the sake of amusement. Laurie comes home from school each day and tells such stories about Charles, seemingly for amusement: “‘It was Charles,’ he said, ‘He was fresh. The teacher spanked him and made him stand in a corner. He was awfully fresh’” (73). These stories, as they build upon each other, are the only pieces of information that Laurie’s parents have about Charles until Laurie’s mother goes to the P.T.A. meeting at the end of the story. Laurie’s anecdotes, though entirely bogus, are the only “truths” that his parents know. Laurie creates a world in which he makes the rules, focusing all of the attention exactly where he wants it—right on himself.
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By Shirley Jackson
