Stolen Days Analysis

As the narrator of the short story “Stolen Days” said: “It must be that all children are actors.” This idea can be applied to the short story “Charles” due to the fact that the young boy in the plot has a tendency of acting in a way that is not like his usual self. A liar and an actor cannot be considered the same things. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines an actor as “one who behaves as if acting a part” and a liar as “a person who tells lies” (____). In the story, a small child named Laurie has just started kindergarten. Each day after school Laurie would talk to his parents about the existence of another child, Charles. After about a month of the lies, Laurie’s parents attend a school PTA meeting where they are informed that there is
not a Charles in the class. This can lead the reader to assume that Laurie is in fact Charles. This can be related back to Merriam-Webster’s definition of an actor due to the fact that the child is is portraying himself as a character. An example of this is when the story states: “with the third week of kindergarten Charles was an institution in our family… Laurie did a charles when he filled his wagon full of mud and pulled it through the kitchen” (Jackson 363). This can help the reader to understand that the child is an actor because he is not acting as his normal self, instead he is acting like Charles. In the story, it seems as if Shirley Jackson illustrates Charles as Laurie’s alter ego. This evident when the book talks about how Laurie acted at school versus how he acted at home. “My sweet-voiced nursery-school tot” (Jackson 360) is how Laurie’s mother described her child. This helps to prove that Charles is Laurie’s alter ego based on the fact that his mother seemed to have zero clue that her child could act so terribly. Information like this in the story can help the reader to understand that Laurie is indeed an actor taking on the role of his alter ego, Charles, rather than just being a young child who enjoys fibbing to his parents.