Charles Shirley Jackson's Life

Charles is a poorly behaved kindergartener, but does not even exist at all. Shirley Jackson wrote a short story about a misbehaved young kindergartener called “Charles”. This young child is named Laurie and misbehaves on multiple occasions for numerous reasons. Furthermore, this short story occurs in the home and school of a family in the 1950’s. Laurie newly began attending kindergarten, however, he did not adjust to this change in a positive manner. In fact, he acted out a considerable amount of times for various reasons. One of these reasons being that he simply did not enjoy kindergarten immediately. For example, Charles had already been misbehaving on the first few days of kindergarten such as “The third day… Charles bounces a see-saw on the head of a little girl and made her bleed” (Jackson 346). Therefore, it can be assumed that Charles was poor at adapting to change and acted out on the account of not liking his transition to
Laurie lied about who Charles was to be able to talk to his parents about something without them knowing that Charles did not exist and the he was the one committing all of the acts that were claimed to be Charles. Laurie had lied about Charles in every scenario that had truly been him, both positive and negative, this means that Laurie had lied to his parents quite a lot, making himself a rather large liar. One of these many instances occurred when “Charles yelled during story hour and hit a boy in the stomach and made him cry.”(347), once again lying about who had really completed those acts. Even so, Laurie’s mother still found out about Charles at the PTA meeting when “ No one mentioned Charles” (349), and after confronting the teacher learned that Charles did not exist and that Laurie had committed all of the misconducts. This reason shows that Laurie is a liar as well as a misbehaving attention seeker and shows how he had