Charles

Compared to Jackson’s other work, “Charles” is distinct in tone and genre. Jackson is primarily a horror and mystery writer, and her other stories, like “The Lottery” and The Haunting of Hill House, are deeply rooted in those genres’ tropes. “Charles,” on the other hand, is much lighter and even comedic, without the same suspenseful and foreboding stylistic elements. The matter-of-fact tone and casual exchanges between characters carry the story forward in a light-hearted way. Laurie comes home and is rude to his father, and his anecdotes of Charles sometimes involve the latter’s violent antics, but the subject matter never approaches anything too dark. Still, Jackson’s affinity for mystery is detectable, as the story’s ending is indeed mysterious. The reader can only retrospectively sift through scattered clues.

Because the story’s ending is ambiguous, critics have offered different interpretations. The most common interpretation is that Laurie has invented Charles as a scapegoat—a lie to his parents to cover up and take the blame for all of his mischievous behavior at school. Laurie and Charles would then be the same person, and all Laurie’s anecdotes of Charles’s mischief are actually about Laurie himself. This interpretation finds support in the scene where, during the second week of school, “Laurie came home late, full of news” about the disobedient Charles being kept after school (74). He tells his parents that all the children stayed to watch him; this is a pretext for Laurie’s lateness, and a lie to cover up that it was Laurie who was held after school to be punished. There is further evidence for this reading when Charles temporarily becomes the “teacher’s helper”; as Laurie shares these new, less disturbing stories of Charles’s obedience, he is less enthusiastic, even “grim.” A change in Laurie’s emotional state is linked to a change in his (i.e., Charles’s) behavior at school. Likewise, when the narrator meets with Laurie’s teacher at the end of the story, the teacher shares that while Laurie has had “a little trouble adjusting” to kindergarten, he’s now a “fine little helper” (77). This echoes Laurie’s own description of Charles.

Another interpretation of the story is that Charles is a supernatural being whom only Laurie can see, which would follow more closely with Jackson’s niche genre. When Laurie’s father asks him what Charles looks like, Laurie simply replies: “He’s bigger than me, […] And he doesn’t have any rubbers and he doesn’t ever wear a jacket” (75). He describes no real physical features of Charles, and he gives no other description throughout the story. A related interpretation is that Laurie is neither lying nor seeing spirits but living in an illusion: While he does believe that Charles is real, Charles is actually a figment of Laurie’s imagination. Under this lens, the story can take on different psychological inflections; for example, perhaps Laurie’s own struggle with his changing identity manifests in the changing behavior of his projected image of himself—Charles. This reading could recruit the part of the story when Charles changes his behavior, becoming the “teacher’s helper” and assisting with classroom activities.

The story’s ambiguity exists largely because Laurie is his parents’ only source of information, not only about Charles but about Laurie’s whole kindergarten existence. Nevertheless, because the teacher reveals there is no Charles in the class, this drives home the subversion that Charles exists only within Laurie’s reality—whether this illusory character is a ruse, a supernatural being, or a figment of Laurie’s imagination.

A reader can examine all the factual clues and try to piece together the most feasible explanation for the story’s ending. However, if the interpretative process considers only those plot details that have literal significance, treating them like empirical data in a detective case, then their interpretive insight remains fundamentally limited; a holistic analysis requires engagement with formal elements, namely irony. There is only one reading that achieves cohesive, thorough irony, and that is the prevailing reading—that Charles is a willful fabrication on whom Laurie can blame his own vindictive recalcitrance. The narrator is concerned that Charles is disrupting kindergarten and “unsettling” Laurie, but the irony is that Laurie is the one disrupting others. There is then the irony with the greatest moral and psychological weight: The narrator is increasingly judgmental of Charles’s mother, wondering what kind of woman could raise such a maladjusted child—but, in truth, the narrator herself is “Charles’s” mother. Not simply confused or overimaginative, Laurie is indeed as spiteful as Charles, and Charles’s actions are Laurie’s; no other reading gives the ending the same impact or moral dimension, where the narrative consciousness itself must reckon with its own hypocrisy.