Charles By Shirley Jackson Analysis

Who says you can’t have more than one identity? In “Charles,” by Shirley Jackson, the story reveals how even people staying beneath the same roof may not be fully informed of each other’s true identities. Laurie’s mother, who is the narrator in this story, is unworldly unmindful of her own son’s poor conduct in Kindergarten and is too disposed to presume his illustrations of some different disobeying child. Although her son’s deportment alters when he goes into Kindergarten, she blames this on Charles’s behavior, a boy mentioned a lot by Laurie. In the beginning of the story, the narrator mentions that “The day my son Laurie started Kindergarten, he gave up his little-boy clothes” (Jackson). Laurie going from his overalls, which are his little-boy clothes, to jeans and a belt in Kindergarten, gives the reader an idea of how Laurie had changed his demeanor and his insight on his parents. While entering Kindergarten, a child could go through difficult changes from the abrupt adversity in their life. Maybe Laurie is just going through the same stage most kids his age go through, just more extreme and dramatic.
Throughout the story this boy named Charles is mentioned roughly every day by Laurie and soon becomes a regular topic discussed in the Hyman house. Charles shows
This Charles boy sounds like a bad influence” (Jackson). Ultimately, this creates dramatic irony because the reader registers, before the narrator does, that Laurie’s descriptions of Charles’s misbehaving is actually his own performance. The suspicion of this is confirmed by the Kindergarten teacher at the end of the story when she mentions that they do not have a boy named Charles in their class. The most reasonable inference is that Laurie created Charles’s and has been describing his own mishaps and behaviors this whole time to his